Demons
Part One
**************
Tuesday:
"Tickets, please." The train conductor starts down the aisle. I dig
a ten dollar bill out of my front pocket to give him when he gets to
me. I stare out the window at all the snow-covered trees going by,
New England trees, I tell myself, I've never seen New England trees
before. They go too fast, I can't really look at them. I can't tell
what they're like. Lots of things move too fast. I see white and
get a pretty blue feeling.
"Ticket?"
I jump when the conductor taps the back of my seat. I tell him where
I'm going and I pay him. A dollar fifty left. Enough for a
hamburger maybe if there's a fast food place at the next station.
He seems in a bad mood, so I smile at him. He smiles back and gives
me my change.
I take my orange from my backpack on the seat next to me. I look
around the car as I start to peel it with the Swiss Army knife my mom
gave me last year for my ninth birthday. There's a handful of people
scattered in the train car. Most are reading newspapers and stuff.
Some are talking. No one else is looking out the window. Maybe
they've seen it all before, or maybe they just don't care.
I look out the window again and try to feel connected with nature.
It doesn't work. There are a lot of things I don't feel connected
with and it's been like that my whole life, like some important wire
never got connected or I was missing a piece of my brain. Maybe it's
growing up a bastard girl, maybe it's being just - different. I
don't know.
My name is Renee, but people call me Tuesday most of the time. I
don't have a last name. Actually I do, but it's not mine yet. Never
mind, that's complicated. My mom called me Tuesday. I was born the
day after Mardi Gras, on Ash Wednesday, but my mom said that wasn't a
good day to be born. She called me Tuesday to disguise it. So I
just missed Mardi Gras. I ‘just miss' a lot of things.
My orange is peeled, and I put the rind in the paper bag I brought on
the train. I also bought a candy bar at the store outside the last
train station. Mom hated me eating candy. "It's energy, sure, but
it don't last." But I tell myself that I won't eat it until just
before we come into the station, so I'll be awake enough to try to
find where I'm supposed to go.
It's a good orange. I eat it like most people eat apples, by holding
the whole thing in my hand and biting into it. I have to lean
forward to keep the juice in my hand instead of on my shirt.
Some guy in the front of the car looks lost. "Waitaminute. What
stop was that?"
"Where are you going?"
"I don't know."
I'm going to meet my father. I think he's my father. I've never met
him before. He don't know I was born. I pull a crinkled envelope
from my back pocket and open it one-handed. Inside there are two
pictures from newspapers - just pictures, no articles - and a bent
photograph. I stare at the photograph again, studying the man in it.
He's my father.
LeBeau.
"Remy LeBeau."
I say the name aloud, hearing the word, almost trying to taste the
syllables, even though I know it's silly, that you can't taste words.
Remy LeBeau.
My name is Tuesday LeBeau.
He was standing on a street corner I don't recognize, wearing a long
gray trench coat, black pants, and black sneakers. He had messy
brown hair. His body was facing away from the camera, but he was
looking at it. I guess he's what you'd call handsome. He wasn't
really smiling, but he wasn't frowning. He looked kind of amused,
but like he was guarding something, I don't know. As I take another
bite of orange, I wonder what he was thinking as the picture was
being taken. I wonder who took the picture.
He has red eyes, but they're a different kind of red than photographs
sometimes give you. I stare at them for a long time. I used to
imagine demons with red eyes.
The two newspaper pictures are pictures of the X-men. He's in both
of them. I guess that means he's a mutant, too. I heard rumors, of
course. We all know the rumors,: he is "Gambit," the legendary Thief,
who defeated the Tithe Collector and Candra single-handedly, saved
his wife but decided he was unworthy of peace. It was all myth. Fun
to believe but worthless. People talked about him a lot back in New
Orleans. Nobody seems to know what really happened. I didn't really
follow or understand clan politics. I was always on the outskirts.
I'm not officially a Thief, ‘cause I haven't been through any of the
ceremonies, but my mom - and my father, I guess - were, and I am clan.
"What stop was that?"
Up until right before I left, the peace we had with the Assassins had
held. We got along okay with the ‘Sassin kids, as Pierre and I
called them. It was kind of cool because no matter what we did,
whether team hide-and-seek or stickball, we always had teams already.
We never mixed. We fought sometimes - Henri got himself cut up
pretty bad when one of the Assassins had a knife and he challenged
her anyway. It wasn't usually challenges like that though; it was
usually just a big fight. I've only been in one real one-on-one
fight. I won, but I had to get stitches and my mom was spittin' mad.
Anyway.
So I'm the bastard daughter of a legend. No wonder I never fit it.
If I can't believe in legends, how can I believe in me? It's like
that joke, how if God had no self-confidence, if He didn't believe in
Himself, would He be an atheist? But anyway, no one ever hears about
or cares enough to ask about the bastard children of kings; why
should they care about me? Why should he care about me?
"Hey, Charles, we got a guy sleeping, and it's his stop."
I stare at the photograph again, wondering what to call him. Mr.
LeBeau? Father? Daddy? I almost laugh at the last, he doesn't look
like a Daddy. I wonder if he remembers my mom. She told me a little
about him, but never that he be my father. Sometimes I thought she
forgot who he be. I wonder if it's possible to forget someone like
that, who has red eyes. And anyway, he gave her me.
She never mentioned his name before.
I don't know if she loved him. I don't really know what love is. I
mean, I do, but there's where you love someone and where you're in
love and it's just different. I love my mother more than anything in
the world, but she said that isn't the same thing. I asked Pierre
what he though love was and he said it was "a biological urge to
reproduce." I laughed and told him that was gross. He just grinned
and asked me to play our version of hide-and-seek, where you have to
find the person and then fight them and whoever gets pinned first
becomes it. I've never been in love, and I don't want to be. It
makes you crazy.
"All tickets."
I finish my orange and lick the sticky juice from my fingers. I fold
the pictures and put them back in my pocket. I look outside and see
a brown rabbit sitting under some snow-heavy hedges. Then we pass by
it, and I twist in my seat to look behind but I can't see it again.
I wonder if the rabbit knows who its father is.
I'm cold. I'm wearing my uncle Jean's jacket and it's huge on me.
My hands need something to do, so I pull a coin from my pocket, one
of those big coins you get at Mardi Gras. I start to flip it with my
fingers, which probably isn't the best thing to do when I'm nervous,
but I don't care. My mom says I'm a mutant like my father. I can
charge things up and make them explode. I don't know how. It starts
with a tingle up and down my back, a little like the chill you get
when someone squeezes your shoulders just right. Then I can push it
all into my hands, making them glow Easter pink, into what I'm
holding. Then it starts glowing warm and I feel really cold and kind
of empty. Then I throw it and it explodes when it hits.
I don't know if I like being a mutant. It doesn't matter if I do,
‘cause I'll always be one no matter what. My mom told me once not to
hate being a mutant because there's nothing I can do to change it.
"Don't hate what you are unless you can change it," she said.
My mom tried to teach me how to use my powers. I can charge metal
pretty easily, but anything else is really hard. She said I should
be able to control how big the explosion is, but I haven't been able
to figure out how yet. I just charge something, throw it, and run
like hell.
A cop strolls into the car and sits near the front. I tense
automatically. I hate cops. But I haven't done anything wrong, at
least not nothing he could know about
"Hey, how are you? Haven't seen you in a while."
All the buses and trains are a blur now. I just know that this is
the last train. Which is good. I haven't slept in three days. All
I've eaten is some cookies, a burger when I had to transfer in Grand
Central Station, DC, and the orange.
I find myself wondering again who my father really is. I know his
name, but that's nothing. My mom's name was Aimee, but it doesn't
say anything about who she was inside. ‘Gambit' says a bit more, but
not much. I guess he's a gambling man.
It occurs to me again that for all I knew he could be anything from a
hit man to a car insurance salesman now. I wonder why he won't just
kill me as soon as he sees me. I don't even know if he wants a
daughter. That we're both clan won't matter; he renounced the clan,
my mom said. That we're family won't even matter, if he abandoned
his and even killed his own brother-in-law. But that was all legend,
too. How much of the legend was true?
"I don't care how much it costs...no...look, put Thompson on the
phone, will you?"
I pray quickly to Mary to let him be a good man.
I'm betting my life on the turn of a card, on a man I've never met
before.
Suddenly I really miss my mom. I haven't cried for her. She taught
me never to cry unless you've played all your cards and lost
everything, and unless there's no hope. I have hope; not much, but a
little. If he's dead, or doesn't care about me, then I'll have lost.
But not until then, and I'm not going to think about that.
My mom asked me once if I were satisfied. I wasn't really sure what
she meant, but I said I had what I needed. But when I asked her the
same question, she got a funny distant look on her face and said she
had "sat on too many cold toilet seat and slept in too many hard beds.
" She changed the subject before I could get her to explain. It
still doesn't make any sense.
I start to doze off. It's at least an hour before my stop. I can
take a quick nap. I see my father in my mind, but he's flat like a
photograph.
The train rattles on along the track. The trees still go by too fast.
I wonder sleepily how you're supposed to notice them anymore.
***
Jean:
Yeah, I knew LeBeau. When he was young. Younger, anyway. He hung
with my little brother Augustine. Seemed like a good enough kid.
Jean-Luc's son, going to grow up to lead us Thieves and all that
noble crap. He fell in love, I heard, with some chick in Paris.
Next thing I knew, he had married Bella Donna, killed his brother-in-
law, and was out of New Orleans by sunrise. Just gone. Both guilds
were ready to shit. Of course he claimed Julien's death was self-
defense. Augustine told me different.
My sister Aimee's raising a kid she insists on calling Tuesday, even
though the kid was baptized Renee. Something about the birthday or
the circumstances of birth being unlucky. I don't know, Aimee's
pretty superstitious and religious. She's raised Tuesday like her
own even through she only an aunt.
Almost eleven years ago my older sister Celeste disappeared or was
kidnapped. We never found out why or by who. When we finally found
her - huddled by a barge on the Mississippi, she was nearly fucking
catatonic. Pregnant, too. We took care of her for the next year,
helped her give birth to the kid Renee, then she died a few months
after. She never came out of whatever kind of coma she was in, but
she'd babble and scream to herself, stuff about labs and metal and a
white-faced guy with black makeup she said was evil or something - I
forget the word she used - , and mumble stuff about little Remy
LeBeau.
He was missing the same time she was. He was found a little later,
in better mental health, but in terrible physical shape. Took months
before the kid be back to normal again. He never talked, never said
where the fuck he'd been for the three weeks, like he didn't remember
or was too damn terrified to say anything, even to his own family.
He did come back changed, though - his eyes had somehow gone from
brown to lava red, spooky as hell. And that's when he first got his
mutant powers.
The kidnapping of the son of the head of the Thieves did spark a
small war, but we realized pretty quick that the Assassins had
nothing to do with it. Even they ain't that fucking stupid.
You gotta admire the charisma swirling around that kid. He was only
twelve, and folks were already ready to fight for him. Kill for him.
He wasn't even a thief by blood, but blood don't matter much as
family, and he was family.
I saw him before his wedding, and that was it for two, three years.
Then he came back to whip Candra and the Tithe Collector's asses,
save his wife, and leave. No word about Tuesday, but that's expected,
since he don't even know she was born.
Tuesday had his powers, the ability to charge cards with energy or
whatever. We figured she had to be connected to LeBeau, but we
weren't sure how. We never mentioned it to either him or the kid and
pretended Aimee was her mother. We kept her hidden as best we could.
That was Aimee's idea. She told me why. Seems LeBeau was also on
the run from a guy called himself Sinister, and the fuckin' guy
would've probably come for Tuesday if he knew she were around.
Aimee be a mutant who had some kind of, I don't know, some kind of
fucking shielding so no one could sense the kid's mind and know where
she was or nothing. Whatever it was, it seemed to work, ‘cause no
guy in black tights and Goth makeup came to take her.
Then it all got fucked up.
Augustine got us pulled into a gang fight with the Assassins. The
sons of bitches killed Aimee. No honor, I'm telling you. Scum like
them have no fucking honor. Then they pointed at Tuesday and said
something like "she's the one" and we guessed Sinister must have been
working with them to find her.
We had to get her out. LeBeau be her father or whatever. Time he
took care of her.
Figure I got three days to get back to New Orleans for the funeral.
Took her as far as I could. Now she be on her own.
I'd adopt her if I could, but from what I hear about this Sinister, I
couldn't fight him if he came. LeBeau can.
He better.