Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery Page 7

  Chief Claude spoke now: “The BIA, over the years, has created a monster of crazy regulations. People don’t fit in boxes on a piece of paper; we aren’t horses you buy or sell based on our bloodlines. Sometimes the confusion looks like bad faith or worse, but in general these BIA folks mean well. Lot of times, they’re Indians, like us. I want to tell you a story, Tommy. You know of the Jena Choctaw?”

  The chief was referring to another central Louisiana tribe, which had fought a long battle for recognition.

  “Sort of,” Tommy said. “I think they got recognition not long ago, didn’t they?”

  Chief Claude nodded. “In 1901 the government told the Jena Choctaw they maybe could have land in Oklahoma, Indian Territory. A group went on up there to meet with a federal commission, but they came back two years later without any agreement. Then the government up and tells them, yes, they do qualify for land, no doubt about it; but they got to go back to Oklahoma. They said forget it and stayed. In the seventies and eighties, they got their act together and finally made a formal application for recognition, and it was approved in ’95. How you like that story? Almost a hundred years jumping through the government’s hoops. This blood quantum rule was another sneak attack by the white man: he knew that scattering us would weaken us, that intermarriage with whites and blacks and whatnot would one day make the Indian blood just a drop in a big lake.”

  “I guess history answers a lot of questions,” Tommy said.

  “That’s my job in a nutshell.” Nick placed several sheets of paper on the table. “Have a look. I’ve come up with some suggestions for qualification of applicants. You start fairly wide and after a generation, narrow it a bit to a one-parent descendancy requirement, to ensure commitment to the tribe without harping on blood quantum.”

  Chief Claude excused himself, allowing Nick and Tommy a good hour of work.

  Later, as Nick stuffed his papers into his battered soft-sided leather briefcase, the chief returned.

  “May the Great Spirit bless you and keep you out of New Orleans parking tickets,” he said to Nick as he slapped him robustly on the back several times. The Chief had often heard Nick complaining about the city’s draconian traffic-law enforcement.

  “I almost forgot.” Tommy dug in a pocket of his jeans. He pulled out a wad of cash. “Here’s a small down payment, Nick. Three hundred dollars. I won five hundred on a scratch-off lottery ticket. Guess maybe I’m not all bad luck.”

  Nick left the two men and walked into the secretary’s smaller office. He looked back to see Chief Claude conducting Tommy around the room, pointing to the shelves crowded with artifacts, helping the younger man understand how to build a new identity for the Katogoula. He envied Tommy his opportunity and his courage. To few was it given to cross the impossible gap of years and mortality, to form, as much as is humanly possible, a living link with the past.

  Faint sounds of the casino filtered down a hallway lined with photographs of big winners. Did he actually hear prehistoric chants and the pounding of drums emanating from the chief ’s office, mixing with the muted electronic tintinnabulation of the casino? . . . No, this was merely a figment of his rampant imagination.

  I’m the bridge keeper.

  Now, there was a title he could live with. He stood between two worlds, serving as the bridge keeper between white and Indian, between clock time and endless cycles, “modern” religion and ancient animism, between the individual bloodlines and the tribe. And he decided who crossed the millennia.

  Seldom was so much at stake in his genealogical work, and he felt the responsibility as never before.

  He took a deep breath that broke the spell.

  “You okay, Mr. Herald?” the young Chitiko-Tiloasha woman asked. The monitor of her computer displayed spreadsheets thick with big numbers no doubt generated by the packed casino.

  “Yeah, fine, Sally. Thanks.” He found himself near a photo of a ceremony at the White House, featuring a younger, handsome Chief Claude. “What was the occasion here?” he asked, trying to show he was not daydreaming but instead studying the photo.

  “That was 1994. First time all federally recognized tribes were invited to the White House. Chief Claude’s up front, because he’s short. On the right of President Clinton.”

  Nick suspected it was the chief ’s skill in working the system that ensured his proximity to power. In more recent photos Chief Claude appeared with other presidents and influential muckety-mucks. The breadth of his practiced smile through the years suggested to Nick that Chief Claude didn’t care which party held the reins, as long as he got what he thought the Chitiko-Tiloasha needed.

  “Sally, do you gamble?”

  “Oh, no sir.” She made a disapproving face at the foolish idea. “All my extra money goes into the tribe’s retirement plan.”

  Offering “free” or discounted drinks for gamblers was a Vegas trick to persuade people they were actually getting something for their money. A tipsy gambler was much more likely to keep swiping that debit card and keep pulling the arm of the slot machines.

  Nick savored another cup of strong, delicious black coffee, trying not to think how much it had actually cost him. He’d decided to hazard just a few more dollars on the slots before hitting the highway back to New Orleans.

  The last of twenty dollars’ worth of quarters barely covered the bottom of his plastic change cup, which was festively decorated with cartoon alligators, armadillos, crawfish, and pelicans cavorting around the casino’s slogan, “Big Luck on the Bayou!”

  Nick had heard that high rollers were rewarded with free food, complimentary rooms at the adjoining hotel, and golf and tennis privileges on the professionally designed courses and courts of this growing resort complex. He wondered if the perks—or comps, in industry parlance—included illicit sex, as was the reputed practice in some gambling Sodoms elsewhere in the country.

  Nah, not here! he told himself. This is a moral outfit, all for a good cause, untainted by the standard depravity of the industry!

  “May I get you some more coffee, Mr. Herald . . . or anything else?”

  Nick looked up and saw a woman with lots of blonde hair swirling onto her shoulders. Early thirties, he supposed, attractive even under a showgirl’s load of makeup. Her stunning blue eyes had an arctic brilliance. She worked for the casino, and not in an inconsequential capacity, Nick instantly sensed, from the penetrating appraisal she was giving him.

  “No coffee, thanks, but you could explain to this machine that I’m a really nice guy who hasn’t won a dime all day.”

  She gave him a warm, obviously practiced smile. Nick read her nametag: “Val, Management Team.” Val wore a variation of the dealers’ costume, though she looked anything but institutional: frilly white shirt with bow tie, tailored red blazer, tight black stylized riding pants, tall black boots.

  A stripper on a foxhunt, was Nick’s immediate impression.

  Val propped one glossy boot on his chair. She leaned close. Her perfume, strong even from a distance, hit him like a sadist’s kiss. He could hear the subtle jangling of her silver-and-rose quartz earrings—a product of the reservation’s crafts business, Nick recalled. He’d seen them in the casino gift shop and had considered buying them for his French friend, Veronique—but, dreaming of piles of lucre, he’d chosen instead to gamble away his commendable thoughtfulness.

  “You’re the genealogist I’ve heard Chief Claude speak so highly of, aren’t you? Chief Claude’s a sweetheart. A very—oh, I don’t know—a very proper man.” She waited a beat and then continued. “My company does business a little differently than the Indians. We’re aggressive, and we usually get what we want. And if our partners don’t like it, fuck them.” She seemed proud of her dirty brusqueness. “We’d like to do business with you, Mr. Herald.”

  “Sorry, but I don’t see where I fit in.”

  “You’d be surprised just how easily you could . . . fit in.” Her white teeth glittered viciously. “Our corporate president is absolutely
fascinated by genealogy,” Val explained. “He’s authorized me to hire you to work on his family history. Of course, he’ll want exclusive access to your time. That would mean dropping any other projects that might interfere. All of them.”

  Nick stuck a quarter in his slot machine and pulled the handle.

  “Projects, for instance, like helping the Katogoula get their families enrolled?” The slot windows whirled for a few seconds and then jolted to a stop on a lemon, an orange, and a bunch of cherries. He tried again. “Maybe I’ll have better luck at their casino . . . if they’re able to build one.”

  Her mane of golden ringlets tilted as she took in a new perspective of his face. “Luck o’ the Draw International pays its contractors very well, Mr. Herald. Very well.”

  Nick’s instinct for self-preservation shouted an alarm and rushed forward to shield him.

  “Let me sleep on it, Val.”

  “That’s the best offer I’ve had in a while.”

  “What I mean is, I’ll get back to you, okay?” He, too, was a cardsharp in psychological games of deceit. Holding up a coin, he said, “This is my last quarter. After this one, I’m outta here.”

  She stopped him with a frigid hand on his wrist. Working in air-conditioning for hours on end will do that, but Nick was already convinced that Val had ice water for blood.

  “This machine has been giving us some trouble,” she said, releasing his wrist with a lingering, cold touch. “A few minor adjustments should make your visit more enjoyable.”

  She used a key attached to a security bracelet of coiled, plastic-coated green wire to open a panel on the side of the machine. A moment later she’d completed her adjustments.

  “I’m in New Orleans all the time,” she said. “We have a riverboat casino down there, the Crescent Luck. Maybe we could go out for dinner, or something.” She slipped a card in his coat pocket. Her lips brushed his ear as she whispered, “I’d enjoy getting to know you much better, Nick. Especially since we’ll be working together soon.”

  Nick dropped his quarter in the slot machine and pulled the handle. The wheels seemed to spin an unusually long time.

  But what did he know about the mechanics of gambling, about odds and payoffs and mob connections, about the game Val was playing? His place was among dusty, mildewed archives, or in front of an archaic microfilm projector, attempting to match pieces of history for a genealogical jackpot. A scholarly hermit gets into trouble only when he leaves his monastic cell. Too many times in the past he’d forgotten this cardinal rule of his order.

  The three wheels of symbols settled after much internal clanking and ticking. A trio of pots full of gold showed in the windows. Lights on the machine began to pulse, and a siren whooped. Other gamblers gathered, forming a small crowd, some patting Nick on the back, others grumbling about their own paltry payouts.

  He looked around for Val, but she’d vanished like a light frost at sunrise.

  Another casino functionary appeared, spoke into a walkie-talkie, and snapped Nick’s picture.

  “Congratulations, sir!” the young man said with a cheerleader’s gushing good humor, pulling the photo from the camera and handing it to the flash-blinded Nick. “You just won fifteen hundred dollars!”

  CHAPTER 8

  Freret University graced an idyllic, verdant rectangle shoehorned into one of the most beautiful uptown areas of New Orleans, on the fringe of the Upper Garden District. Founded in 1839, Freret was a charter member of the ivy league of academically excellent Southern private colleges—or the “Kudzu League,” as Nick and his friends used to say, substituting the creeping weed of the Deep South for the aristocratic ivy of the North.

  Along with the fine education and high teacher-to-pupil ratio it offered, Freret also dished up a sanitized taste of the addictive decadence of New Orleans. For those who survived this expensive, protected bohemianism, a Freret diploma commanded great respect, and sometimes prompted salacious assumptions, on a résumé. Prospective employers were wont to view a Freret graduate as a cross between Marco Polo and Marquis de Sade, or Sally Ride and Janis Joplin, who had sojourned in a mysterious, magical, perverted kingdom and returned unscathed—except for alcohol-induced brain-cell loss—to tell about it.

  The New Orleans elite treated Freret like a distinguished ancestor who brought honor to the lineage. If you didn’t have a Confederate officer with a high-caste French or Spanish surname in your pedigree, a Freret graduate in the clan would go a long way toward redeeming that deficiency.

  Early Friday morning Nick boarded one of the venerable, lovingly maintained green streetcars downtown at Canal for the twenty-minute rocking ride through the splendors of the Garden District, and finally to the St. Charles Avenue side of the university. The impressive trio of rough-stone buildings anchored by Gibbon Hall—called the Fortress for its neo-Romanesque massiveness—seemed to give him a surly welcome as he stepped down from the streetcar onto the palm- and crape myrtle-lined grassy neutral ground dividing the traffic lanes of St. Charles.

  When he resigned from the faculty of the English department at Freret, more years back than he cared to remember, dispirited and indignant over a baseless allegation of plagiarism, he thought he was glad to be rid of the place and of his accusers, still unidentified to this day. But even at his young age at the time, he’d been a teacher too long to quit the academic life cold turkey without emotional consequences. Soon he fell into a yawning intellectual and spiritual void that dwarfed even the temporary emptiness he’d felt after his brief marriage ended in divorce, years earlier in graduate school.

  Genealogy rescued him from a cancer of cynicism that might have turned suicidal. His passion for the new discipline was the reason that today he walked Freret campus as simply a tourist, and not an updated Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy’s tragic casualty of defeated aspirations.

  In no hurry to reach his destination across campus, the library, Nick strolled past the Fortress, relishing every familiar aspect of the well-manicured, compact campus that now spread out before him.

  This first-of-the-semester walk had become a ritual of fall for him, different from his regular, usually hurried, visits to the campus for research. The balmy New Orleans air; a St. Charles streetcar’s distinctive lazy clamor in the distance; sunlight slanting through the old oaks; the hulking Italianate buildings, like waking giants, with only a few windows illuminated in this orientation week . . . all the recollected sensations of a couple of decades in academia, as student and teacher, brought him as close to melancholy as he would now let himself come. For this one moment of each year, he could again be one of those rare and great teachers, believing in endless possibilities, hoping for the imminent birth of genius from a seed he planted in a receptive mind.

  Enough mental loafing. He picked up his pace. Hichborn Library would be opening about now.

  Still he enjoyed the way the few wandering students glanced at him with mingled respect and dread, their eyes as clear and innocent as the morning dew on the inviting, lush grass of the mild deep southern fall. His bulging briefcase, scholarly slovenliness, and enigmatic smirk must have given the impression that he was a faculty member, probably in the midst of planning a diabolically difficult course. He wanted to reassure these kids, break through their fears, urge them to be bold, tell them of the new worlds of knowledge and new ways of thinking that were hanging like ripe fruit within their grasp.

  “That’s my reader!” a woman’s voice protested to Nick in a grating whisper. He’d just finished loading a reel on an apparently free machine in the library’s second-floor microfilm-reading room. It was an old machine, but a motorized one, essential when examining many reels.

  He turned to see the owner of the voice: a short, thin woman posed in a combative hands-on-hips stance. She had a helmet of dull leaden hair, as if the roots had grown through an inner layer of acid. Her glasses were oversize squarish lenses of considerable strength. The white light reflecting upward from the reading surface of the microfilm ma
chine cast her face into a monstrous abstraction of bleached skin, black shadows, and floating gray-blue eyes. Her wheeled lawyer’s briefcase was supremely ordered, revealing folders of different colors, and enough pens and notebooks to stock a small office-supplies store. When the final days of Civilization-As-We-Know-It came, she would be taking notes and applying Post-It Flags.

  Nick recognized her immediately as a genealogical survivalist—one of the peculiar personality types that the study of genealogy attracts. Or maybe produces. He himself was turning into something of a genealogical hermit, periodically shunning the affairs of the world for days or weeks in pursuit of the elusive answer to a research problem.

  With keenly honed skills the genealogical survivalist fights an information battle every working day, determined to get those microfilms and books she needs, and get them first, at any cost. It’s scoop or be scooped. And what she doesn’t need, she tries to keep from others. Every discovery by someone else diminishes her own accomplishments, her years of unappreciated toil on her own family’s history. Increased digital availability of records does nothing to deter the genealogical survivalist’s lust for power. Sure, she could probably access much of what she needed from the comfort of her home, through the great Web services now available. But she relishes face-to-face combat, nastiness in person, and as long as there are microfilm readers and printed materials and researchers who need them, she would be at the library or the courthouse making lives miserable to the best of her ability.

  Nick had known several genealogical survivalists who, having no real research project at all, engaged in a demented campaign of silent sabotage and obstruction. Very unpleasant people.