Free Chasing the Devil's Tail by David Fulmer Page A

assistant tended to their manicures, and yet another shined their shoes.
    Buddy and Valentin knew the cast of characters like some boys knew the players on a baseball club or the gamblers knew the horses at the Fairgrounds. So they noticed when suddenly one disappeared. Before long, they'd know why: in jail or dead, for the most part. But always there was another candidate to slip into the vacated place.
    They were gawky kids, both growing too fast for their clothes. Buddy, brown-skinned, getting tall, Valentin shorter, his skin so light so people often thought he was plain Dago. The two of them stood shoulder to shoulder, staring wide-eyed into that waiting room to the world of night. And the scenes beyond the glass were caught and held in time, like one of Papa Bellocq's photographs.
    Still later, Valentin was sent off to Chicago just as Buddy's widowed mother was taking up with Manuel Hall, a plasterer by day and musician by night. It was Hall who taught Buddy the rudiments of the horn, but student quickly outstripped teacher, and Master Bolden left school to play music and work day jobs. Along the way, he fathered a son by a local girl, both of whom he promptly forgot.
    By the time Valentin came back from his wanderings, Buddy was a bit player in the cast at the Louis Jones Shaving Parlor, because it was there and at the other barber shops around uptown New Orleans that band leaders left word that they were hiring for this job or that.
    He was not yet spending his nights there, lazing with the sports. He had a pretty wife and new baby girl and half of a double shotgun down on First Street, just up the street from the house he grew up in. That all came later, when his horn and his good looks and his reputation turned him into one of the fancy men that a new crowd of young boys ogled through the tall windows.
    That was right about the time that Valentin joined the New Orleans Police Department. They saw each other now and then, but Kid Bolden was now a regular rounder and St. Cyr was a copper; they were set apart by their choice of uniforms and, truth be told, embarrassed by each other. It was after Valentin quit the force over the rough business with his sergeant and began working the back-of-town streets that their paths crossed again. The friendship resumed, awkwardly at first, then with more comfort. But a distance remained, and they both knew it would never go away.

    Valentin strolled by the shop, saw only a solitary barber sitting in a chair, reading a newspaper. It was early; people were still at their suppers.
    He walked down two blocks to the corner of First Street and picked out one of the white clapboard shotgun houses that lined the streets in every direction, set apart from the others only by the number 2719. The street was quiet. He put a foot on the perron and knocked.
    Nora Bolden opened the door. Her eyes flashed with surprise, then settled on him with an inscrutable calm. "Is he dead?" she said.

    Nora asked if they could walk. She left Bernedette with the next-door neighbor and they strolled to the corner of Philip and Howard, then east in the general direction of downtown, away from the neighborhood.
    Valentin figured that she did not want to happen upon Buddy's mother and sister, who lived around the corner on Howard Street. He recalled Buddy telling him that Nora never liked his family, she called them "funny." Though she was religious, he guessed she had a superstition about whatever had
gotten hold of him. One person picked up a curse or some other
gris-gris,
the whole family suffered. It could be in the blood and it could go back generations.
    She was a small, very pretty woman of medium-brown skin, a good mother and life-long member of St. John Fourth Baptist Church who now found herself in a common-law marriage with a madman.
    As they walked, she began to recount her own version of the tale. Everything had been good at first, though she fretted over Buddy leaving steady jobs playing in parades