The Krewe (Herbert and Melancon Book 1) Read online

  The Krewe

  Herbert and Melancon Book Number One

  By

  Seth Pevey

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 1

  When you run over a human being with a train, there isn’t so much as a bump for those people riding or conducting inside the cars themselves. People are just too soft, and trains too hard and inestimably heavy. It might as well be mud under the flanged steel.

  But there didn’t need to be any physical sensation for the conductor, 47-year-old James LeBlanc, to know that he had indeed cut a man in two. Probably three or four pieces really, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to look at the aftermath of what he had done— or what the train had done, anyway.

  The dissected man had never screamed, James the conductor believed that. Immediately after the body disappeared beneath the wheels, James had hardened himself and listened well. He tried to block out the train sounds as only a conductor could, cringing in that expectation. The waiting had seemed to stretch out as he hearkened for any human sound, a wail or yelp, but there was nothing.

  It must be instant, James thought, it must feel like nothing to be run over by a train. Then in that moment, and for years after, he repeated it to himself often.

  But the fact of the matter was that a man had died, “had come out of the fog,” as he explained it. “A man where a man shouldn’t be. Out of the cypress trees there along the river. The willow logs and the duck pools. Out of nowheres. One minute there was nothing at all, and the next there he was, long arms and wide shoulders, kneeling there on the tracks and facing away from the train.”

  “Away?”

  “Yes, away.”

  In that hot instance James the conductor had known the full futility of applying any brakes to the situation, but he’d done so anyway. It was policy of course, and there would be questions. You did not cleave a man like that, even a man that seemed to figure on being chopped up, without a lot of papers, and questions, and old men in out-of-fashion suits leveling their challenging eyes at you over those desks that always seemed to shine a tad bit too brightly. So, in that moment, as James explained it, he’d applied the brakes and listened hard for that last cry of a dead or dying man, telling himself that it was surely only a brief snap before darkness. Just like falling asleep. He’d applied the brakes and waited and what the hell else is there to say about it?

  James knew what he’d seen and felt. But it wasn’t that easy. Later he would drink. He would cry, drunk, during commercial breaks. Later he would see the man’s back in his closet, kneeling away from him in the darkness as he went in to find fresh socks or his box of old letters. James could not have told these things to the detective though, even had he known them. It was the facts that were important now. A man was dead.

  “No the man did not cry out. I believe I’ve been plenty clear on that,” James told the police detective.

  “Was there any noise at all?”

  “I’m sorry, I thought I’d explained all this?” James was shivering, the train-trembling in his bones that never seemed to dissipate, and that damn shine on the detective’s table. The look in his eyes.

  Detective Melancon was old and thin. His clothes fitted poorly and were of a forgotten color. But his eyes were bright, pale blue, piercing, and his mouth seemed far from tired. He cleared his throat and sat down.

  “You know, James. The human mind is a terrible, awful recording device. For starters, it remembers things plain wrong more often than not. Emotion clouds the mechanism, you see. Even the brain of a sharp man like yourself. You’re an engineer, right? So, do me this favor. Forget for a second about the dead guy. Just explain this to me like you were explaining the workings of…say a combustion engine. Cold and practical, just like that. I know you must be upset, running over a fella and all. But I need to hear it all a couple times. It’s always better hearing a story a few times. I find it helps for…clarity. Now James, I need you to be clear. Think hard. What else did you see?”

  “I didn’t run over him. The train did,” James replied.

  There was a long pause. “Sure, I know that James.”

  James softened in his chair. “He looked fit. Tall, big like maybe a football player or something. The way he was kneeling was almost kind of regal.”

  “Regal?”

  James fidgeted. “I don’t know. Like, a guy about to get knighted in one of those old stories. Two hands across his knee you know. Kneeling down. A quarterback posing for his picture.”

  The detective ran his fingers through the little swirl of blonde hair dusting the top of his head. He rubbed his eyes and then his temples.

  “And you say he didn’t react. He just knelt there, facing away from you? No last-minute hesitation or jerking, anything like that?”

  “No. Nothing at all. It looked like he was just waiting for the thing to be over,” James said. He thought he might have a small inkling of what the dead man must have felt, sitting here with the detective and wanting a drink so bad he could weep, waiting patiently for destiny to crest so that it might crash down on his head. There was a lot of waiting left to do. Nervous, restless waiting. Life was made of waiting. Waiting for the train to load, waiting to arrive, waiting for the blood and guts to be cleaned from the wheels so you could get the shipping containers into port. Perhaps death was all waiting as well. Whatever might come of this particular incident, it was going to be an awful long wait for it to all go away. An awful long time for him to chug along under the weight of it all. Him that had done nothing but his job.

  “James the conductor…you are a human being,” the detective said, as if to himself. “A distraught human being, having a conscience nagging at him and what not. This is to be expected. And perhaps as a…distraught human being, you have failed to notice and recall some small particulars, some tiny details. It was late and the air had held that swampy texture that…you know…sometimes keeps secrets.”

  There was a long and heavy pause filled with that look again. The detective just kept talking.

  “Swamp gas, it makes people see ghosts and UFOs sometimes. But what does it matter really? You don’t go down to the riverside train tracks, on a school night no less, and kneel before an oncoming locomotive. Not unless you want that sweet hereafter. At least that’s how James the conductor sees it…am I getting close here friend?”

  James blew out air. He looked from side to side, seeking succor on the cinderblock walls. It felt like talking about sex with a priest somehow.

  “Detective, honest to God what the hell does it matter how I see it? I flip a lever, the train goes. I hit the brakes, it stops a few football fields down the way. Now, I don’t know what else you want me to say. I told you, all of it took about 3 seconds. I saw him. I applied the brake. And then we just went over him you know?”

  Melancon rubbed his head. He stood up, began pacing across the room, stopped before a filing cabinet at the far end by the door. James was wondering what bullshit form he would have to fill out, only to be surprised when Melancon pulled a bottle out from the beige wasteland of the cabinet. Two glasses followed and the drawer slid shut on its tracks with a grinding, metallic finality that dropped James’ tremble into a lower gear.

  “You’re a drinker, aren’t you?” Melancon asked.

  “I don’t drink on the job, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Oh, of course not. I assume they probably already put you through a drug test as well.”

  “Yeah…something like that.”

  “So drink up.”

  James watched the amber liquid fall into the glass. There had been no sound as the man’s bones had cleaved apart. No sound as he was sucked under into the hell that exists under a train. But the sound of that liquid falling in that glass was thunderous.

  “Why would you choose that?” James blurted out, transfixed on the tumbler.

  “Excuse me? It happens to be a very fine scotch.”

  “No, I mean… Why would you want to die that way?”

  The detective’s body bobbed. He held up his scotch and then crossed his arms. James, while terribly thirsty, thought that this guy needed a shave, needed to talk and smile less, and definitely didn’t need to pour drinks. He was too open and familiar already without the booze lubricating the wheels any more. But then, maybe that was the way they got you to talk. They lubed you until you became like a runaway freight rolling down the hill towards a stalled school bus full of children and nuns. Or long-limbed depressives kneeling by the dozen.

  He needed to talk. But slamming the gate shut was a smarter track. He’d have hard work to do at home but now was no time for going off the rails.

  “Well, it’s like this Jimmy. May I call you that? Somet
imes suicides don’t just want to die. They also sometimes want to feel the pain.” He took a long sip of his drink and leaned across the desk. “You know, just like how the bite of whiskey is a sort of… pleasant pain…reminds you that you are still… alive…damnedest thing. Maybe they hate themselves. I don’t know. Ever been suicidal Jimmy?”

  The body language of the detective was casual and loose, but his blue eyes were not. They watched James minutely, measuring him.

  James poured himself a second shot from the bottle and said:

  “No, I never was suicidal, and I’m not now if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Melancon slapped him on the back. “You’re salt of the earth Jimmy. I’m glad to get to know you, even under these circumstances.”

  “Going back to what you said before though, about feeling pain. You do reckon he felt pain then?”

  The detective’s face took on a thoughtful scrunch. “I don’t know that I really thought about it that hard Jimmy, for obvious reasons. What do you reckon it feels like?”

  James didn’t answer.

  The detective swirled his drink and downed it, smacking his lips. “I doubt it feels like a shiatsu massage, anyway.”

  James the conductor nodded somberly. “So, a suicide then, is that how you are putting this down on the books?”

  The detective’s eyes fell as he put the bottle away.

  “We’ll have to see Jimmy. Anyway, you are free to take off. You’ve got my card. Sometimes it’s funny how it happens, but something might just pop into your mind. When that happens, give me a call.”

  James finally got up and walked to the door, stopped at the threshold and turned to look back at the detective.

  “I just wonder who he was, is all.”

  Chapter 2

  “Man, you cut onions like old people fuck.”

  It was painfully true. Felix Herbert could barely use a knife. But he was trying anyway— focusing, sweating over the pearly spheres with tight teeth and a grip that was wildly inappropriate for the task.

  But of course, Sweets, the provocative pastry chef, was like the rest of the real world, in that he just didn’t care about a person’s effort all that much. While Felix was slowly coming around to this and other facts, there were to be many growing pains. The spectacle of his hard-fought battle with the onion was just one of many.

  “Gotta take your time to do it right, I guess,” Felix mumbled. No one heard it.

  “Man,” Sweets continued, “you know you shit at this job Felix. My lil baby cousin got better knife work than your sorry ass.”

  Felix bunched up his lips, put down the knife and looked at Sweets in the eyes.

  “I don’t see you cutting any.”

  Sweets leaned his head back and raised his hands up in the air.

  “Listen to this shit. Chopping ain’t my job son. My job is cakes and pies and salads and all that cold and creamy bullshit. That’s why I’m over there where it ain’t 150 degrees.” He pointed. “You the one over here sweating in all the food and shit. Salty ass.”

  Felix was a young man with long legs and wide shoulders, and he didn’t seem to belong. Every metal edge, red-hot flame, hissing vent, and ex-con employee of this kitchen ran counter to the softness in his face, the leisure of his gait, the unearned angle of his chin. The rest of them knew it. They smelled it on him.

  The dishwasher and the sous-chef both sat by the outside door to the kitchen, chuckling their smoke out into the night. Felix tried to bite his tongue and went back to work: lined up the blade carefully, perpendicular to the onion’s grain, and let the weight of it carry down through the acrid, white flesh. It was a sharp knife, brand new, and he’d cut himself too many times.

  It was hell being laughed at, but he understood it. He was younger than them, less experienced with hard work than they were. He certainly hadn’t been to prison like at least two of them had, and wouldn’t know the first thing about knife work if he hadn’t come here on what increasingly felt like a foolish whim. He fought to keep the color from his cheeks.

  The onion acid burned his eyes, and the heat lamps did, in fact, cause him to sweat into the food. It was inevitable. Just like it was inevitable that these three hard men were going to be giving him more of this throughout the shift— that men like these would be at him his whole life if he didn’t learn to handle a knife, a hammer, a wrench the right way, and soon.

  “You a cook right? So how did you even get to be a cook…. without knowing how to cook?” Sweets asked. “More importantly, why is you a cook? You got that look like you used to buying thousand dollar watches and shit.”

  Sweets did an unflattering walking impression then, all stiff and rigid. His performance was well received.

  “Do you see me wearing any thousand-dollar watch?” Felix asked.

  “Nah man, you probably didn’t wear it cause you think we’d steal it.”

  It was Felix who now laughed, bent his head down. He slid the knife across the table and spit into the trashcan. Something came over him.

  “I bet I can cut more onions in five minutes than you can. 100 bucks.”

  That took the smirk off of Sweets’ face. He looked at Felix— that wide-eyed, rhetorical look of a workman.

  “You fucking with me?” he said, cocking his head. He was paying attention.

  Felix knew he’d lose as soon as he said it. Why had he said it then? Maybe just to derail the whole “make fun of Felix” train. Or, maybe, was it that he was trying to buy his way into some friendliness? He didn’t know what he had in mind, but after saying it he was sure of one thing: now they were going to have his pride and his money in one easy swoop, and he’d only just been there a week.

  And so, the onion chopping contest took place during a busy dinner rush. Fortunately for sporting sake, the executive chef who “ran” the kitchen was out in his wine bottle somewhere. So, the patrons wouldn’t get their veal cutlets or osso bucco on time.

  There were more important things at stake now.

  The sous-chef stood holding his cell phone stopwatch aloft. Two plastic cutting boards were laid out side by side. Sweets ran his knife along an oiled whetstone and bobbed his head to the radio.

  “On three,” the dishwasher called over the printer, which rolled out a long ribbon of tickets that had now begun to droop to the floor unattended.

  “Three, two, one, chop.”

  Sweets had a fine technique. He was left handed, and so used the knuckle of his right hand to guide the base of the blade as it rhythmically tapped through the onion. He had a way of letting his wrist go fluid, so that the turning of the knife landed like a wave through the vegetable. It was the kind of skill that was won through the absolute necessity of being useful. Felix knew this, knew all this in the space of one sigh, gaping at the man’s fluttering, skillful hands— like old blackbirds, rough looking though fine in flight, delicate and calloused.

  Sweet’s half gallon bucket was halfway full before Felix could make it through the first onion.

  He’d need to speed up. Not to win. Winning was impossible. However, he hadn’t figured that he would be beaten in quite such a humiliating way. A degree of disgrace now seemed to be hanging in the balance. His slices where too measured and hesitant, and he kept turning his head to watch the flurry of competitive, artistic dicing happening just to his right.

  By the time the fry cook began the countdown, Sweets had stopped chopping. His bucket full, he slipped his long and tattooed body up onto the metal countertop and was twirling the cutting board on his pointer finger like a basketball. The ticket machine kept rolling, and Felix didn’t pause or break his small momentum. Instead he sped up. Perhaps an attempt to save a little face, or the simple knowledge that all of the onions had to be chopped anyway— but he kept chopping, all the way down to the “One” of the countdown, at which point his brain attempted to cut faster than his clumsy hands could follow, and the knife slipped. He sliced the meaty part of his left thumb nearly down to the bone.

  He didn’t cry out, but the other kitchen hands saw the blood and stopped laughing.

  “Yo, Felix man. That’s going to need stitches bruh.”

  He stood there with his kitchen towel wrapped around the pulsating muscle, the blood already soaking through and dripping down onto his apron and the grease mats along the floor.