Excerpt of Veiled Prophet by Devin Thomas O'Shea
The following is an excerpt of Devin Thomas O’Shea’s as-yet unpublished novel, Veiled Prophet.
To whom it may concern,
Angie did not plan to kill herself or check-in to a mental institution. She was of sound mind, and told everyone she worked with that this was the case. But, she was leaving soon and wrote a note about it in her zine: “I may be sitting on a thin mattress in the St. Louis county lockup by the time you read this. I want everyone to know I am not contemplating suicide. I am not hearing voices. I am not seeing things that are not there. If you are reading this after August 1993, then I have tried and failed to skip town with my parent’s checkbook. I am not depressed or otherwise mentally unstable. I am calm. I will be good. I will wait for my trial if it ever comes, but they will likely send me to Idaho, to a wilderness reform camp for rich girls. If another copy of this zine is never printed, you will know why. If you want to help me, I love you, but you can’t.”
Angie Chouteau was the daughter of René-Auguste Chouteau Jr. the Fifth. Her mother was Deandra Desloge-Lacléde, and in that way, the Chouteau family held a grand prize for in-breeding. Both St. Louis’ founding father names under one roof— Lacléde and Chouteau are like Romulus and Remus. Lacléde and Chouteau were L & C before Lewis and Clark. They were the Lewis and Clark of their era; then the doofus brothers panhandled their way up the Missouri at Jefferson’s request, standing on the shoulders of giants, shitting on every tribe from the confluence to the Pacific. That’s how Angie saw it anyway.
Her father believed these founding men were angels of another land; pure souls forging into the darkness, confronting every obstacle with gun in one hand, cash in the other. Angie did not know anything at all about county lockup. She knew how thin the mattresses are in the Richmond Heights Police Station; she knew the sheets are like paper. Inmates and guards could both agree they disliked spoiled white girls. Spoiled white girls are rare birds in the nets; one shake and they’re gone.
She heard sirens down Washington Ave; it was July—they had to keep the factory windows open or else the floor cooks. Angie wrapped her legs around the stool legs for better leverage, tilting into her work table; an industrial-sized wooden spool laid on its side, same as their dinner table, same as the TV stand, and the costume tables which held Victor’s rambling wardrobe. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, the big cement stone beneath her chair, their floor, radiated heat like a brick in the oven. At night it gets freezing cold. Angie was going to miss standing outside on the fire-escape with no shoes on, letting her bare feet relax on the harsh iron grating, having a cigarette with the pit bull across the alley, Bowser. Bowser and all these things she’d come to know about her cooperative squatting situation were about to be snapped up by the past.
She’d be safe enough for a few nights at Mooreland, but she was safer in the squatter apartment downtown. There were goons all over Mooreland. The border between private security goons, and the STL-PD goons, is porous. One has a cushy gig driving up and down gated private streets with a fat 401K, and the other’s tasked with ignoring the echo of gunshots pinging off the Arch, vibrating the big U-shaped thing like a tuning fork.
Angie loved X-acto knives. They loved her so much they took a piece; the brown spatter on the kitchen cabinet wood was blood that once belonged to her. Her palms had gotten sweaty, and she had not yet developed a rhythm that let them dry while keeping up with the speed of her thoughts, especially after a bit of Pearl for inspiration. The knife slipped, taking the tip of her thumb. Angie remembers holding it up, now a bit shorter but otherwise looking okay? Then the tip spit red across the room. They still found speckles of it here and there whenever pulling out the fridge or moving the toaster. Is it possible to be a poser and spill blood for your zine? Only a poser would wonder, Angie thought as sat up, straightening her back, realizing one of them was out on the factory floor.
It was seven o’clock and the sky was hazy orange. 1993 had been hot and wet in St. Louis, but drenched the northern dairy lands. The news said the flood season was the worse it’d been in a hundred years. Maybe that’s why Angie had been seeing more of them—this one was out there going up and down aisles of invisible looms, stopping to make sure something wasn’t tangled; stop this one and work on it for a moment before firing it up again. Reaching their small hands into gear shafts that Angie couldn’t see. All she saw was a girl of fourteen up on tip toe, working, preoccupied with machinery that had been broken down and removed, parts scattered to the four corner junk lots.
Angie sat there wishing she didn’t have to see her: the girl went rounding a corner at the end of the studio’s floor. She was laughing about something, maybe with one of the other girls. It was getting dark out, but she didn’t seem to mind and kept working. Angie finished her cut out. There must have been some kind of industrial lighting at whatever time she is from. The working girl came back toward Angie down another row, walking through the arm of their couch. What Angie theorized to be a being of time—a kind of organic smudge on the continuum—seemed to look at Angie for a moment. They did that sometimes. They looked at her as if seeing something strange in the reflection of a mirror; maybe her reflection in the window panes. They can’t see her, Angie has figured, because they don’t react to her. She can try and jump up and chase them down, she can yell and scream at them, she can throw beer bottles at them but then Angie has to explain to Vic and Brendan why the floor of their apartment is covered in broken glass, and Angie has to say, “I had an accident,” and leave it at that, because explaining the people she’d seen since birth was an impossible conversation. It only ever landed her in a mental health hospital, or the STLPD drunk tank.
Maybe it was because Angie stayed still, but this smudge went on for a long time. Angie cut the outline of her page-girl figure, blew the shreds of the photo paper away. There would be more photos to go through in the attic on Mooreland. She glued the back of her cutout, and laid it on the zine’s drafting paper with careful fingers and a 7/8ths of a thumb. Angie was going home for the first time in five years, pulling the rich kid ripcord. She’d shower with hot water, run off the zine on the copier in Five’s office, eat well. Sell out for clean sheets and central air. She would have to get reacquainted with the smudges of her girlhood. The one’s she only saw around Mooreland; the man in the attic. The little boys near the carriage house. The woman in the mirror on the second floor. Angie let her thoughts wander into why she’d been seeing more of them lately, and why making the zine, offering it to the spirits like a Shinto priest, was not working as of late, and when she looked up, Angie saw the factory girl doubled over on the floor. She is wailing in pain. Her figure is painted in an orange polygon of light produced by the factory window grid. She is being cradled by someone. They are smoothing the hair out of her eyes. She is looking up in abject fear. Someone is pulling her arm away from its place tucked in her smock. They are examining her hand. Part of it missing. Fingers and the palm. She is breathing heavily. She is so scared; she’s so scared she is going to pass out. Angie watches from the stool as the girl’s breathing jolts. Her chest puffs out, and her head cranes to the side, eyes flicker and close. The last thing they settled on is Angie.
Angie let the stool fall back. The shock of everyday violence washed over her for a moment. She looked up and the factory girl was gone; Angie Chateau felt unwell and went to take a nap.
The Veiled Prophet Ball was 182 days away.
--
She was dreaming about Rocky and the night club when the sound of the bedroom door’s latch became louder than the music. Upon a pile of his stray shoes and boots, Brendan tripped directly into the box fan on the shelf. It crashed into the floor, Angie shot up in the bedsheets and went for the baseball bat leaned against her bedside table. Fuck. It wasn’t there.
Brendan failed to right himself bending over to grab the fan off the floor and ended up on his ass. Criss cross apple sauce on their carpet, he righted the fan and wind flowed again.
“Sorry,” he whispered-yelled. “My bad.”
“You smell like alcohol and the river.”
“Gee, how was the house Brendan?” he said pulling off his boots. “Is the whole neighborhood underwater? Is any resale value in the house fuckin’ wiped out?”
“Sorry,” she said without passion, wrapping the sheet around herself. The river had been high all summer and Brendan’s mom’s house was down in a high-risk zone where the Mississippi backed up into the River Des Peres. There was the sound of his belt unbuckling. There was the sound of being too drunk to kick off your trousers. Soon he will board the mattress with boozed breath. “You should brush your teeth.”
“I did this morning.”
She remembered when he used to fall asleep kissing her neck. “Where’s the bat?”
“I dono.”
It was long past midnight. Angie looked up at the sky. It was black without stars. “You brought it to the batting cages with Vick last Friday. You had too much to drink and forgot it.”
His dark figure was up on wobbly knees, smelling like old bar mat, coming in for a landing Angie glided out from underneath, taking the sheet with her.
Brendan’s head landed in the pillows, and his body did not move. His mother had passed away a few months ago, and Angie would not be there for him. She would not try to pull someone from a shipwreck, when all they want to do is drown. “Go to bed,” she said standing with the sheet pulled around her shoulders.
“I’m okay,” he said to the pillows. He didn’t hear her get dressed, or carry her bags to the freight elevator. He didn’t hear her pull the elevator’s roof strap, closing the gate like a wooden set of lips, Angie Chouteau and her things below a single light bulb, swallowing her down, carrying her away for good.
“I got good pictures,” he said. “Vick almost died.”
Chapter 2
Sonny Green waited to pick up his granddaughter in the apartment lobby. Piles of mail, plate glass doors, fake plant. Azariah got the morning off, Sonny got the pleasure of Briah’s little company. Outside, morning sunlight glancing off the New Cathedral’s green domes a few blocks away. “Isn’t that pretty Bree?” he said as she bounced down the stairs and he pushed open the doors for her.
“Mm-hm,” Briah nodded with her hair’s plastic ball braids clacking.
“What? It’s not?” he asked on the way to the car. It was St. Louis summer and already getting hot at 7 in the morning.
“I see it every day.”
“Doesn’t mean it can’t be pretty.” It was light soaked church, in the morning, and though Sonny wasn’t a God-fearing man, he’d always enjoyed the optimism of a solid stone church, warblers chirping in the city’s shrub trees, his granddaughter’s company.
Breakfast at the Mac-Donald’s the drive-through—sausage-egg sandwiches with ketchup. Hash browns medallions. “We need our strength,” Sonny explained. They ate in the parking lot. “So where are we going Bree? It’s your turn to pick.”
“Botanical,” she said the way ten-year-olds say “botanical” without a clue as to its meaning. To Bree the gardens were the gardens. They had a special name—botanical—but it was nothing more than a name. Same as St. Louis. Ipso-facto, Briah’s definition of the world she lives in is adjustable, Sonny figured. Therefore the world becomes the sum of all experiences in that world, so the more of St. Louis Briah Green Fowler saw, the better her understanding of the world.
“Aw, but we went there on Friday, Bree,” Sonny said, crumpling up the wrapper of his second breakfast sandwich, taking up his hot paper vessel of coffee. “Can I make a suggestion?”
“No. I wanna go to Botanical.”
“You know how there’s a flood, Bree? Well somethin’ happened way out in Chesterfield Valley. They’re calling the place Lake Chesterfield now. Whole place is flooded.” Coffee in the cup holder, Sonny started up the Cutlass. “We should go and check it out. Does that sound like fun?”
“Can we go to The Magic House after?” Briah’s fingers had gotten pretty greasy from the hash brown.
“Sure,” Sonny said, figuring she’d forget by the time they were done. She had dance class at one anyhow.
Sonny Green drove a dark blue Cutlass from 1984 with blue interior and blue diecast molding for all the interior. It was the kind of car a man could take his family to church in. It was a car for your Sunday best. He and Briah would burn afternoons in the back pew of St. Michael & George, till she couldn’t take it anymore and they needed to run around outside, and yelp, and climb the playground equipment of the school outside, grandpa being careful not to bust a hip. They would visit the stacks in the University City library on rainy days, they would collect leaves on a walk through Forest Park, or Oak Knoll, or Tower Grove. Sonny and Briah were connoisseurs of the St. Louis parks. They could visit downtown, visit the Galleria shopping mall; or stay near the Green family home in Richmond Heights and take a walk around the block, let Briah chase rabbits through the yards—something she was now a little hesitant to do ever since one of Sonny’s white neighbors came out on her porch to reprimand the girl for scaring the bunnies, and Sonny had to have an all-out argument that put his blood pressure far too high, and so they had to rest on the stone bench at the top of the hill as they always did, but this time a little longer to insure grandpa didn’t stroke out. That was the nerve of these people. Sonny Green’s name was writ in annals of American Law, in a Supreme Court Record 411 U.S. 792, McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green. That woman hollering at Briah was yelling at royalty.
--
Driving west on Highway 40 meant traveling through time, following white flight through sedimentary layers of Midwestern architecture. It began with French riverfront colonials Sonny and Briah visited near the Soulard Market; cobblestone streets, gas lamps and then time’s arrow shot west takes you through post-war modernism. Every dozen blocks toward California represented a different decade of white people trying to get away from Black people. It ended in the curved bends of West County’s drywall and all that suburbia. Lilly white office parks with vast blacktop parking lots. Smooth, new roads.
They parked on the Clark Street overpass and Sonny grabbed his hat—a black beret—from the back seat. Briah popped her seatbelt and the passenger door open. “Wait for me Briah Green,” he said scrambling.
They stepped over a strand of yellow police tape guarding the on-ramp. A half-dozen disaster tourists were already down there anyway, waiting by the shore. Cops too and some kind of news crew. All six lanes of Highway 40 dipped down into Lake Chesterfield. People shielded their eyes, snapped pictures, shook their heads as they tried to figure out the one-liner they’d tell at the salon or the VFW.
“What do you think of that?” Sonny asked Briah. “Come here and hold my hand.”
“That’s a lotta water,” she said. “A lot, lot.”
“A lot, lot, lot,” Sonny said. The air smelled extra clean the way it did when you walk down the banks of a river. Summer in the city meant high parts per million humidity; eating away at abandoned brick buildings, rusting out cars, breaking up the roads like an acid bath. Out here in the county, it felt pleasant as a sauna, restorative, dignified the way the South is both dignified and destitute at the same time. And the destitution is always blamed on the northern element; the factories by the river, the Black folks in North County, the industrial city of capital and commerce versus the rolling verdant hills of the kountry klub kounty.
“Oh my…” Briah said, pulling grandpa along as he realized that wasn’t a news crew. “It’s the queen. It’s the queen!”
A couple stooges held reflector cards around Becky the Carpet Queen as she posed by the highway waterline. For the camera, she stood on her signature flying oriental rug laid out on the asphalt. The queen spout her tagline with a big Midwestern smile: “Because nobody beats Becky’s!”
“Cut!”
Becky gestured at the yellow tape ruining the shot and lit a cigarette.
“Queen!” Briah shouted, shielded her eyes from the sun, waving.
Becky looked over and blew smoke. “Well hey there,” she smiled, and waved, and Briah pulled him wanting to get close enough to see the glittering green sequins on her dress, and the golden tiara, and maybe Becky would even let her stand on the carpet for a moment.
“My stars, is that old man Green?” Becky said as they got closer and Sonny took it on the chin, wiped his Billy-D mustache, and nodded keeping an eye on both the camera and those hotdog-neck County PD. Even on a peaceful morning adventure with your granddaughter, they might lose count of a Black man’s taillights, somewhere between one and two, and that was another reason for visiting as many places with Bree as they could, crossing over into the white spaces whenever it was feasible: Sonny Green had purchased the opportunity long ago. He had exchanged his life in a bargain with the city: Call him the MLK of St. Louis, let the history books report that Sonny Green was the closest thing St. Louis ever got to Malcolm X., but they didn’t shoot him, and in exchange, Sonny kept (relatively) quiet.
Becky yelled at the camera man about getting rid of the tape. “Some folks just don’t understand cameras,” she said and took a drag. “Not like you Mr. Green. How about you hop on in here and help me move some carpets.”
Her perm was the color of polished copper. “I didn’t know they were making commercials for money laundering,” Sonny grumbled. Everyone knew Becky the Carpet Queen’s Retail Emporium from its commercials between every St. Louis sports game; Becky was the monarch of local access television, green-screened magic carpet edited to seem like she was flying through the Arch; layered atop on helicopter footage. Sometimes she was accompanied by the Princess of Tile, Wanda—blonde, dressed in glittering pink.
Becky blew smoke out the side of her lipstick red lips, and smiled at Briah; “Hiah there, princess.” She leaned over and shook Briah’s little hand. “Lovely to meet a fan.”
Briah shook the queen’s hand and then ducked behind grandpa, suddenly bashful.
“Who’s it going to be this year, Becky?” Sonny asked. “You pop in the running or are they tried of the department store men?”
The Carpet Queen smiled; “I have no ide-er who’s Veiled Prophet this year Mr. Green. They keep it a secret you know.”
Becky was crowned the Veiled Prophet’s Queen of Love and Beauty in the year 1982—same year ACTION got away from Sonny’s leadership; same year they decided enough peaceful protest was enough. A bunch of the ACTION protestors rushed the stage and fired off some canisters of mace; called it a “Cry-In.” It was a big embarrassment, ruined the night, but Becky made good use of her title. Couldn’t take that from her. “Come on now, Mr. Green. Understand where I’m coming from. I could use a foothold in your community’s demographic. Just stand next to me with the thumbs up and say, ‘Civil Rights hero Sonny Green here to tell you, nobody beats Becky’s!’”
Briah looked up at him, Sonny looked down at his granddaughter’s wide eyes. “Do it,” Briah whispered, giddy with the thought of grandpa on TV.
Sonny squinted in the sun. A 70 MPH sign stood on a dry crabgrass embankment, brown floodwater swallowed up the road and went on and on for miles out there. Swallowing trees, and bushes, and fields, and Annie Gunn’s restaurant, and the West County strip mall. “No thanks,” Sonny said to Becky. Rugs were good for cooking the books; one notch down from fine art, and besides, Sonny didn’t do cameras anymore. “I’m not for hire.”
Becky examined the last bit of her smoke as if reading a fine print message in the ash. “You want to know who the Veiled Prophet is this year?”
“I could look up all the last names of the debutantes and take a guess.”
“That’s still a hundred families,” Becky said, dropping her cigarette on the asphalt beside the rug, putting it out with the tip of her royal green heel.
Despite everything, he did want to know. Sonny Green wanted to know who bombed Gena Scott’s car in 1973. He wanted to know how the Veiled Prophets handled William Webster as head of the FBI, then the CIA. How many prophets worked at the Pentagon? What are the disputes within the organization? What is the long-term plan? Did the Veiled Prophets engineer Pruitt-Igoe to be a city-wide time bomb? Why did John Cockreel kill the Veiled Prophet’s founder? Why did they shoot Col. Alonzo Slayback dead? But he’d been off camera for decades now, and his Panther days were long gone. This prince had settled into the looks of a handsome bullfrog. “No thanks. I’m happy just being grandpa.”
“Suit yourself,” Becky said. “Don’t really need your help anyhow. Floods are great for us. Gotta tear up a whole mess of carpet out there,” she said gesturing to Lake Chesterfield. “I’ll see you at the Chase?” She said, “December twenty first, right?”
Sonny hitched up his trousers, “Come on Bree. Say goodbye to the queen.” He did it every year—parked outside the Chase Park Plaza and watched all the Veiled Prophet people arrive, get out of their expensive cars, walk the red carpet beneath the Chase’s lobby chandelier. Debutantes, their fathers, and the blue bloods. Sonny watched them; they kept an eye on Sonny.
They headed back up the highway to the Cutlass, and Briah seemed happy; contented to have met a queen, saw a disappearing lake, and almost got her grandpa on TV. The factories with white smoke around them were where the clouds were made, the Miss-iss-ippi was full of magic fish. That’s the way it was for Briah, for as long as possible. He looked back over his shoulder at St. Louis always going west in constant sprawl; away, away, away; expand out and cross the Missouri River. West, and west, and west, away from the urban element; away from the ghetto; away from the Black people, and the poor people, and the poor Black people with their drugs and crime and contagious mental illnesses. Start fresh in the suburbs and let the police bring about the submission of everyone else. Every St. Louisan knew a little something about the Veiled Prophet, but most spoke of it simply as weird tradition. A weird ceremony kept out of the public eye thanks to Gena Scott, and the ’72 unveiling, but that’s as far as ACTION ever pushed them—into the shadows, but still there. Sonny had read a phrase in an old newspaper. He’d read it on a microfilm machine in 1981 and it stuck with him: A steamboat had been deliberately set on fire in the early 1870s, right around the birth of St. Louis’ Veiled Prophet. The reporter called it “something a la Ku Klux.” Something a la Ku Klux. Something a la Ku Klux staggered around St. Louis in broad daylight—this thing from a nightmare. It begged Sonny Green to kill it. It wanted to be put it out of its misery, lose its corporeal form, exit into the past. But the Veiled Prophet was protected; juiced, animated by tradition. Animated by hate. He should have been interred in the Missouri History Museum long ago, sealed inside a tomb, deep in the basement vault with a warning sign on the door.
Devin’s writing is in Current Affairs, Boulevard, Essay Daily, CHEAP POP, The New Territory, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. He went on NPR and the TrueAnon podcast to talk about Veiled Prophet, and he graduated Northwestern’s MFA program in 2018. @devintoshea on twitter, @_toshea on instagram.