Hoodoo

"I brought this," Tony pulls out a package and unwraps the chicken foot as though it is precious treasure. In fact, it is raw offal dangling from twine.

"Damn, man, what's that for?" Jamal reels back like the foot is the most disgusting thing he has ever seen.

"Good luck," Tony shrugs. "It means good luck, right?"

"Naw, man - that's a rabbit foot," Jamal laughs.

"What's this?" Craig emerges from the alley, and the wind wails his arrival. He fingers the twine and shakes his head. "This is some hoodoo shit, Tony-o!"

Jamal and Tony lean in close to listen to what Craig will say next. His family is old NOLA, hanging on with sheer Southern stubbornness and tracing their roots back from Craig through the Jazz Age, Reconstruction, and, if Anne Rice adaptations are to be believed, when vampires had Tom Cruise's crazy charm and Brad Pitt's bone structure.

"Gramma's big into hoodoo, you know? She told me once a chicken foot is like, a protection charm," Craig says, "Not exactly good luck, but probably better for us if shit goes down."

If shit goes down. Tony thinks about the bad reception on his mom's tv set, grainy static interspersed with satellite images and doomsday prophets in the form of news anchors and politicians.

If shit goes down. Jamal pictures Big Ray and his swagger; Jamal sees the man’s face, an unfazed mask devoid of remorse every time the police arrest him.

If shit goes down. Craig remembers Gramma's stories of the past Big Easy, how families can float without a care in the world and then spiral down the drain as quick as dirty bathwater.

"Y'all still want to do this?" Craig's voice has the unmistakable shake of nerves and fear.

"Where'm I gonna go, motherfucker?" Jamal barks. "Ain't got money to leave, ain't got another place to stay."

"Yeah," Tony chimes in, his voice a tinny echo after Jamal's baritone bravado. "I came home and Mama won't leave, says the place'll stay up. I try to tell her what the people on the TV say, but she won't listen."

Come with me, please!
No, Antonio, no. It's safe here.

"Fuckin' language barrier," Jamal says, as though it can boil down to that.

"We should go," Craig says.

                                                                                                          ***

"I should have stayed," Tony says during a moment of relative quiet. The light is dim and the air is thick with humidity. Years later, they would tell people they were in danger of slowly suffocating in the Superdome, and the only thing that ever cut through the heavy air was the stench of rot and disregard, poor planning and impossible expectations.

"You can leave if you want, Tony-o," Craig replies. He does not say it with the anger or malice Tony expected. "If you're worried about your mom, it's the right thing to do."

Tony realizes he thought less of Craig than he should, and feels bad that it took a literal disaster to recognize this.

They have been in the Superdome for three days, and something has changed among the three friends: they will always be fellow survivors, bound by the knowledge they were once refugees in their own home.

"Yeah, but can you leave?" Jamal asks. There is a slow, unhealthy wheeze in his breath that makes everyone nervous. "They say there's already looting, but you know that's ridiculous. If you're taking food and cases of water, that's not looting; that's survival."

"You don't know what's going on out there," Craig says.

"I know no one's wading out for some DVD players when there's no electricity and no black market," Jamal retorts.

"Do you think she's okay?"

Craig and Jamal stop bickering and exchange glances in the dim light. Jamal coughs and the search for an un-empty water bottle in the ration kits distracts them from answering: no, probably not.

They don't have anything to steal, so they don’t catch anyone’s interest until the fifth day.

"Diablo," the old man says to Tony, pointing a crooked finger at the chicken foot. The old man looks like he may keel over any second.

"Oh, shit," Jamal whispers.

"Why didn't he throw that thing away?" Craig says. "Maybe that's adding to the smell."

Tony tries to explain to the old man, to reason with him, but everything sounds stupid: see, I abandoned my mom because she refused to leave, but I took this chicken foot for good luck, and then it turns out that a rabbit foot is good luck, and maybe I shouldn't have thought hacking off the limbs of small animals was good, period.

The old man has the crazed, delirious look of near-death in his eyes, like Greek mythology and the Fates--Atropos grasping the old man's thread of life. She'll sever it at any moment. Craig doesn't know the words that slip from Tony's cracked lips, but he can see the same panic that Grandpa had at the end. There is no reasoning with Death.

A stout black man approaches the group. Jamal bristles; they're now attracting attention.

"What's this? You piss him off?" The man says. Jamal doesn't care that his shirt is stained with sweat; it's the dried blood that has him worried, and that look he's seen from Big Ray so often: defiance and cool cruelty. This new guy doesn't care about the old man; he wants to fight.

The tense undercurrent was bound to surface, and no one is surprised when someone falls to the ground. The surprise, at least for a moment, is that it is Tony who throws the first punch.

Craig knows they only have a temporary advantage, so he kicks the fallen man in the ribs, eliciting muffled cries.

Jamal watches the chicken foot whip through the air and connect with the man's face again and again. Blood covers the tiny claws like nail polish and scarlet stains the twine.

Shit goes down.


Written by: Erin Justice
Photograph by: Jaemin Riley

One Lucky Bastard

Every evening he walked half a mile down to the 7-11 to buy his lottery ticket. On the walk there, he smoked his pipe. On the walk back, he cleaned out his pipe and chanted the Powerball numbers over and over again in his head.

When he got home, he’d turn on the TV and wait. 7-37-9-2-82-12.

For three weeks, he’d played the same numbers. 7 for July, his least favorite month. 37 for the age his mother was when she died, standing over the kitchen stove sautéing vegetables. 9, the age he was on that day, when he entered the kitchen, turned off the stove, and called his father at work. 2 for his two good legs, for his two good feet, one in front of the other. 82 and 12 for the street address of the 7-11. 8212 North Lucas Drive.

When he won the Powerball, the 7-11 would experience a boom in business, and they’d put his photo above the counter. 8212. You have to tip your hat to the places that bring you luck. He wasn’t sure how long it was going to take to win. Probably only another couple of weeks.

He’d been avoiding the lottery. His father had been pushing him for years, “Use it on the Powerball,” but he’d always resisted using his luck for straight cash. It seemed wrong. But his father was ninety. And people who are ninety should get what they want.

After his mother’s death, he noticed strange things happening in his life. At a school assembly a few weeks later, he fixated on the end-of-the-year raffle prize: a gift certificate to Shoe World. Though his name was in the goldfish bowl only once (other more goody-goody kids had multiple entries for good behavior), the principal drew his name. It echoed across the gymnasium. He bought the red high-top sneakers his mother had said were impractical.

The cafeteria always served pudding on the days he craved it. He aced multiple-choice tests without cracking a book. When his father was up for a promotion at work, he paced the perimeter of the office building, envisioning the scene, until his father emerged and high-fived him in the parking lot.

The closer he could get to the luck, the quicker it would deliver. When he decided on Brown for college (Harvard or Yale would be too suspicious), his father took him to Rhode Island to deliver his application in person. He took seven campus tours to cover the most ground. His acceptance letter arrived a few weeks later.

By the time he was in his sixties, he was using most of his luck on internet giveaways. They were less conspicuous, and he found he could speed things along just by surfing the individual sites for a few hours a day. He took an all-expense paid trip to Montana when he won a Marlboro contest, despite the fact he preferred pipe tobacco. He entered his second cousin Darla in the HGTV dream house giveaway, which she won. He won iPads and computers and free groceries and shopping sprees, most of which he gave to relatives who were sworn to secrecy. He liked things simple. He lived on his luck, but only in such a way that he could remain under the radar.

“You gotta do the Powerball,” his elderly father croaked into the phone. “It’s the ultimate test.”

“But I have everything I need,” he said.

“Just do it,” his father said. “Do it for me? Move me into one of those luxury nursing homes with the sexy water aerobics instructors. Come on.”

So he did. He walked to the 7-11 and played his numbers. 7-37-9-2-82-12.

“Is today the day?” Kevin, who worked the register, asked.

“Might be,” he said.

“Dude, if you win, you should buy me a car. The AC’s broke in my Fiesta.”

“Sure thing,” he said.

As he left the 7-11, he ran his hand over the top of Kevin’s car and let the cool freon vision wash over him. He made a mental note to stop by the mall tomorrow and enter the drawing for whatever car they were giving away in the rotunda.

When the bowtie-clad announcer on ABC pulled the red 12 ball from the tube, he reached for the phone and called his father.

The phone rang seven times before the electricity in his house started to flicker, then went out entirely. It was almost midnight. He’d try in the morning.

The next morning, the power was still out. He went outside and headed toward the 7-11. It started to rain.

“Dude, no umbrella?” Kevin asked.

“My power’s out,” he said. “Can I use your phone?”

“Whatever,” Kevin said.

He dialed his father again. Again, no answer.

“Do you have a pen?” he asked Kevin.

Kevin gestured to the pen chained to the counter.

He pulled out his lotto ticket and signed the back of it.

“Holy shit, no way!” Kevin yelled, snatching the ticket and holding it up in the fluorescent light. “We gotta call the news!”

“I don’t want to be on TV,” he said.

“Well, I do!”

Kevin vaulted over the counter and called to his manager, “Yo, Ray! You gotta check this out!”

He tried his father one more time. When, on the seventh ring, an unfamiliar voice answered, he knew it was over.

The paramedic told him a neighbor had found his father lying in the kitchen when she came to borrow some sugar. It was probably a heart attack.

“I won the lottery,” he told the paramedic.

“You’re one lucky bastard,” the paramedic said. “I mean, man. Wow. Forget I said that.”

“I’ll be there soon,” he said.

Out the window of the 7-11, the news vans were pulling up. The camera crews swarmed Kevin and Ray, who pointed and gestured in his direction.

The television clip would replay across the country. Kevin, popping and un-popping the collar on his 7-11 polo, says, “He’s gonna buy me a car! Today’s the luckiest day of my life!” Behind him, the winner of the $290 million dollar Powerball lights his pipe and walks away.

Photograph By: Emily Blincoe
Written By: Dot Dannenberg