DR16 - The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  “Why are you doing that?” he asks.

  “So we’ll have a way to preserve our food if we have a total outage,” she replies, a cloud of escaped cold air rising into her face.

  He starts to explain that he’s already covered that possibility with his installation of gasoline-operated generators, that in effect she’s displacing the room in the freezer that should be used for all the perishables they can pack into it.

  But he doesn’t argue. He was a widower when he met her five years ago on a beach in the Bahamas. She was a divorcée, deeply tanned and gold-haired and beautiful, much younger than he, a strong woman physically, bold in her look, her brown eyes wide-set and unblinking, her laughter suggesting disregard for convention and perhaps a degree of sexual adventurism. She was the kind of woman who could be a friend as well as a lover.

  Otis was fifty-three at the time, prematurely bald but proud of the power in his hands and shoulders and not ashamed of his libido or the profuse way he sweated when he worked or the scent of testosterone his clothes sometimes carried. He was what he was and didn’t pretend otherwise. Obviously Melanie, or “Mel,” did not find him an unattractive man.

  They were opposites in many ways, but each seemed to possess a set of qualities that compensated for a deficiency in the other, she with her urban sophistication and degree in finance from the University of Chicago, he with his work ethic and his common sense in dealing with people.

  They said good-bye in the Bahamas without consummating their brief courtship but continued to talk long-distance to each other and exchange presents and e-mails. Two months passed, and on a summer night when the light was high in the sky and he could no longer stand his loneliness, Otis asked Melanie to meet him at the Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta. He was surprised at her aggressiveness in bed and the fact she came three times their first night together, something no other woman had ever done for him. He proposed one week later.

  His friends thought he was impetuous and that perhaps he was being taken advantage of by a woman twenty years his junior. But what did he have to lose? he told them. His daughter needed a mother; Otis needed a wife; and let’s face it, he said, women with Melanie’s looks didn’t come his way every day.

  After the first year he began to realize he had married a complex if not mercurial woman. Her attitudes were often inflexible, although the issue involved was usually insignificant. She canceled the cable service because the technician tracked mud into the foyer. She accused Otis of overtipping waiters and allowing the gardeners to get by with sloppy work. She seemed to carry a reservoir of anger with her as she would a social bludgeon, and selectively utilized it to cause embarrassment in public places and ultimately get her way.

  An acquaintance in Chicago has told him that Melanie’s former husband was an alcoholic. The friend’s offer of information about Melanie’s past has only made Otis more confused. Melanie is rigidly abstemious, and Otis does not understand how her former husband’s behavior could account for her unpredictable mood swings today.

  But the transformation in Melanie that was most difficult for Otis to accept took place after the attack upon Thelma. Each evening she began to show fatigue and complained of nausea and insisted on talking about nonexistent problems with their finances. He could feel her back constrict when he touched her in bed. On Saturday and Sunday mornings she awoke an hour earlier than he and went downstairs and into her day’s schedule, effectively neutralizing any romantic overture on his part.

  On one occasion, unbeknown to her, he glimpsed her picking his clothes off the back of a chair, smelling them, then flinging them with disgust into a dirty clothes hamper.

  Now, as the worst storm in Louisiana’s history approaches the city, he wonders if she blames him for the assault upon his daughter. Is that the reason behind her irritability and her implicit criticism of whatever he does? Does she no longer think of him as protector of his family?

  “I’m going to the club for a workout. Want to come?” he says.

  “Now? Are you serious?”

  “My daddy used to always say, ‘Respect Mother Nature, but nail down the shutters and don’t let her scare you.’”

  She can hardly hide her ennui at his mention of his sawmill-employee father who went to the ninth grade. “Take Thelma with you,” she says.

  “She doesn’t like the club.”

  Melanie makes no reply and begins pulling dishes from the dishwasher and putting them away loudly in the cabinets.

  “What is it? Why do I make you angry?” he says.

  She seems to teeter on a direct answer to his question, her eyes charged with light. Then the moment passes. “I’m not angry. I just don’t think it’s good for Thelma to stay in her room all the time. Maybe she should think about getting a job,” she says.

  But secretly Otis has always suspected that his wife is like many Northerners. She likes people of color collectively and as an abstraction. But she doesn’t feel comfortable with them individually. It’s been obvious from the night of the attack that she doesn’t want her friends to know her stepdaughter has been the victim of black rapists.

  “You think I let Thelma down somehow?” he asks.

  She examines her hands over the sink, feeling the bones in them, the joints of her fingers. She has begun to complain of arthritis, although she has not seen a doctor for at least a year. She looks at the rain beating on the philodendron and the banana trees and windmill palms in the side yard.

  “Why did you let her go to the prom with an idiot who doesn’t know how to wash the dandruff out of his hair, much less protect his date from a bunch of animals?” she says.

  “You never made any mistakes when you were that age?” he replies.

  “Of that magnitude? No, I had to wait until I was a mature woman to do that,” she says.

  He slings his workout bag over his shoulder and goes down the covered walk to the carriage house and backs his car under the canopy of oaks and into the street, knocking the trash can into the hedge. Melanie’s last statement to him is one he knows he will never be able to scrub out of his memory, no matter what form of amends or atonement, if any, she ever tries to make.

  That thought is like a cold vapor wrapped around his heart, and briefly the avenue and windswept neutral ground and the scrolled purple and pink neon tubing on the corner drugstore go out of focus.

  THE HEALTH CLUB is almost empty, the basketball court echoing with the sounds of a solitary shooter bouncing shots off a steel rim. The shooter is Otis’s neighbor, Tom Claggart, an export-import man who flies in a private plane with business friends to western game farms, where they shoot animals that are released from either cages or penned areas shortly before the hunters’ arrival. Tom has told Otis, with a lascivious wink, that he and his friends also land at a private airstrip not far from a brothel outside Vegas.

  “Got her battened down?” he says, the basketball grasped between his palms.

  “Pretty much,” Otis says.

  Tom’s torso is as solid as a cypress stump, his head bullet-shaped. Each week a barber clips his mustache, which is threaded with white, and lathers his scalp and shaves it with a straight-edged razor.

  “I think after landfall we’re gonna have monkey shit flying through the fan,” Tom says.

  “I don’t know as I follow you,” Otis replies.

  “The black Irish get restive after natural disasters.” Tom is smiling now, as though the two of them share a private knowledge.

  “I guess we’ll find out,” Otis replies.

  Tom flings his basketball down the court and watches it bounce and roll across the maple boards into the shadows. The windows high up on the walls are streaked with rain, whipped by the branches of trees. His face becomes thoughtful. “I’ve never talked to you about this before, but my sister-in-law told me what happened to your daughter. They ever catch those guys?”

  “Not yet.”

  “That’s a shame. If they didn’t catch them by now, they probably won’t.”
<
br />   “I couldn’t say,” Otis replies.

  “You own a gun?”

  “Why?”

  “Come Monday, those bastards are gonna be swarming all over the neighborhood. If I were you, I’d stop jerking on my dork and smell the coffee.”

  “What makes you think you can talk to me like that?”

  “Just speaking to you as a neighbor and a friend.”

  “Don’t.”

  “This isn’t like you, Otis.”

  That’s what you think, you idiot, Otis says to himself, and is surprised by the virulence of his own thoughts. Chapter 4

  I T’S SATURDAY EVENING and long lines of automobiles are streaming out of New Orleans, northbound on Interstate 10, although rumors have already spread that there is not a motel room available all the way to St. Louis, Missouri.

  But for the glad of heart, life goes on full-throttle in the French Quarter. In a corner bar off Ursulines, one in which Christmas lights never come down, Clete Purcel has positioned himself at a window so he can watch a shuttered cottage across the street, in front of which a black male is smoking a cigarette in an illegally parked panel truck. The rain has stopped and the air is unnaturally green and contains the dense, heavy odor of the Gulf. There is even a rip of bone-white light in the clouds, as though the evening sunset is about to resume. The black male in the panel truck is talking on a cell phone and blowing his cigarette smoke out the window, where it seems to hang in the air like damp cotton. Then he twists his head and stares at the bar, and for a moment Clete thinks he has been made.

  But the black man is watching a woman in spiked heels and skintight shorts walking rapidly down the sidewalk, her sequined, fringed purse swinging back on her rump. The owner of the bar is opening all the doors, filling the interior with a bloom of fresh air that smells of brine and wet trees. The revelers inside react as though a bad moment in their lives has come and gone.

  “You want another drink? It’s on the house,” the owner says.

  “I look like I can’t pay for my drinks?” Clete says.

  “No, you look like you got the heebie-jeebies. Maybe you ought to get yourself laid.”

  Clete gives the owner a look, one that makes the owner’s eyes shift off Clete’s face. The owner is Jimmy Flannigan, an ex-professional wrestler who now wears earrings and has a full-body wax done at a parlor on Airline Highway.

  “So don’t get laid. But you’re making my customers nervous. No one likes to get stepped on by out-of-control circus elephants.”

  Clete has long ago given up contending with Jimmy’s insults. “I got news for you. The Apocalypse could blow through this dump and your clientele wouldn’t notice,” he says.

  Jimmy pours into Clete’s glass from a Scotch bottle with a chrome nipple on it. The Scotch swirls inside the milk like marbled ice cream. “What’s eatin’ you, Purcel? Just off your feed?” he says.

  Clete drinks his glass half empty. “Something like that,” he says.

  How can he explain to Jimmy Flannigan the sense of apprehension and the déjà vu that dries out his mouth and causes his scalp to tighten against his skull? Or describe helicopters lifting off a rooftop into a sky ribbed with strips of blood-red cloud while Mobs of terrified Vietnamese civilians fight with one another and plead with United States Marines to let them on board? You learn it soon or you learn it late: There are some kinds of experience you never share with anyone, not even with people who have had their ticket punched by the same conductor you have.

  Clete returns to the window and tries to concentrate on the black man parked across the street. The black man is Andre Rochon, a twenty-three-year-old bail skip whose forfeited bond is less consequential than the information he can provide on two other bail skips who are into Clete’s employers, Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine, for thirty large.

  Two drinks later the scene has not changed. And neither has the knot of anxiety in Clete’s stomach or the band of tension that keeps tightening like a strand of piano wire wrapped around his head.

  Clete is convinced he’s watching a meth drop in the making. The two other players are the Melancon brothers, full-time wiseasses with busts on both their sheets for strong-arm robbery, illegal possession of firearms, and intimidation of witnesses. Clete suspects that one or both of the Melancon brothers is about to show up at the shuttered cottage.

  But nothing seems to happen either outside or inside the cottage, and the man in the panel truck is becoming restless, turning his radio on and off, starting and restarting his engine.

  What to do? Clete asks himself. Take down Rochon as a penny-ante bail skip or gamble that the Melancon brothers will show up? When the storm makes landfall late tomorrow night or early Monday morning, the lowlifes will either go to work looting the city or be blown like flotsam in every direction. Either way, it will be almost impossible to get a net over Rochon and the Melancons.

  Clete decides it’s Showtime.

  He puts an unlit cigarette in his mouth, combs his hair in the mirror behind the bar, and fits on his porkpie hat. His cream-colored slacks are pressed, his oxblood loafers shined, his Hawaiian shirt taut on his massive shoulders. A hideaway .25 is Velcro-strapped to his ankle, a slapjack and penlight in one trouser pocket, a set of cuffs in the other. He wishes he were on a plane, lifting above highways that are clogged with automobiles, buses, and trucks, their headlights all pointing north. Or over in New Iberia, where he has a second office and a room he rents at an old motor court on East Main. But you don’t surrender the place of your birth either to evil men or natural calamity, he tells himself, and wonders if he will feel the same in twenty-four hours.

  “You decided to meet a lady friend after all?” Jimmy says.

  “No, I got an appointment in the street with a piece of shit that should have been a skid mark on the bowl a long time ago,” Clete says. “If it gets rough outside in the next few minutes, I don’t want NOPD in on it. You with me on that?”

  “At this bar, nine-one-one is a historical date.”

  “You’re a beaut, Jimmy. Put a couple of inner tubes on the roof.”

  “What about you?”

  “Ever hear of circus elephants drowning in New Orleans? See, no precedent.”

  Clete steps out on the sidewalk. The light has gone out of the sky, and clouds are rolling blackly over his head. He can feel the barometer dropping rapidly now and he smells an odor that is like sulfur or rotten eggs or water beetles that have washed into the sewer grates and died there. Andre Rochon stares straight ahead, his wrists resting idly on the steering wheel, but Clete knows that Rochon has either made him for a cop or a bondsman and is deciding whether to brass it out or fire up his truck and bag-ass for North Rampart.

  Clete crosses the street and opens his badge holder and hangs it in front of Rochon’s face. “Step out of the vehicle and keep your hands where I can see them,” he says. “That’s not a suggestion. You do it or you go to jail.”

  His words are all carefully chosen, indicating in advance to Rochon that he has viable choices, that with a little cooperation and finesse he can skate on the nonappearance and have another season to run.

  Rochon steps out onto the asphalt and closes the door behind him. He wears tennis shoes without socks and paint-splattered slacks and an LSU T-shirt scissored off at the midriff and armpits. His arms are scrolled with one-color tats. He smells of funk and the decayed food in his teeth. His face is narrow, a grin tugging at one corner of his mouth. He strokes the exposed skin of his stomach, as a narcissist might. He probes his navel with one finger. “You a PI, blood?” he says.

  Clete glances at the streetlight on the corner, his eyelashes fluttering. “See, people don’t give me nicknames, particularly when they’re racial,” he says. “Right now you’re standing up to your bottom lip in pig shit. In the next minute, one of two things will happen. You’ll either give up the Melancon brothers or you’ll be on your way to Central Lockup. If you want to be on the bottom floor when the hurricane hits, I’ll t
ry to arrange that.”

  “Eddy and Bertrand already evacuated. I’m just here to see ’bout my nephew. I’m telling the troot’, man.” Rochon presses his palm against his sternum, his face earnest.

  “See, you’re doing something else that bothers me. George W. Bush spreads his hand on his chest when he wants to show people he’s sincere. You think you’re George W. Bush? You think you’re the president of the United States?”

  Rochon is confused, his eyes darting back and forth. “Why you leanin’ on me like this? ’Cause of something Eddy and Bertrand done?”

  “No, because you skipped your court appearance and burned Nig and Wee Willie for your bond. You also smell bad. Willie and Nig don’t like people who don’t shower or brush their teeth and who smell bad. They got to spray the chairs every time you come in their office. Now you’ve disrespected them on top of it.”

  “Man, you been drinkin’ the wrong stuff.”

  Clete’s hands feel dry and stiff at his sides. He opens and closes his palms and wets his lips. He can feel a dangerous level of anger building inside him, one that has little to do with Andre Rochon.

  “Get on your cell and tell Eddy and Bertrand to pull the rag out of their ass and get over here,” he says.

  “I ain’t got their number.”

  “Really? Well, let’s see what you do got.”

  Clete throws him against the side of the truck and shakes him down. When Rochon tries to turn his head and speak, Clete smashes his face into the paneling, so hard he dents it.

  “Shit,” Rochon says, blood leaking from his nose across his upper lip. “I ain’t did nothing to deserve this.”

  “What do you have in the truck?”

  “Nothing. And you ain’t got no warrant to go in there, nohow.”

  “I work for a bond service. I don’t need warrants. I can cross state lines, kick your door in, and rip your house apart. I can arrest and hold you anywhere I want, for as long as I want. Know why that is, Andre? When someone goes your bail, you become his property. And if this country respects anything, it’s the ownership of property.”