DR16 - The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  “I ain’t holding, man. Do what you want. I ain’t did nothing here. When this is over, I’m filing charges.”

  Clete opens the driver’s door and shines his penlight under the front seats and into the back of the truck. The homemade plank floor in back is bare except for a coil of polyethylene rope that rests on a spare tire. A stuffed pink bear with white pads sewn on its paws is wedged between the floor and the truck’s metal side.

  Clete clicks off the light, then clicks it on again. The images of the rope and the stuffed animal trigger a memory of a newspaper story, one that he read several weeks ago. Did it concern an abduction? In the Ninth Ward? He’s almost sure the story was in the Times-Picayune but he can’t remember the details.

  “Who belongs to the stuffed bear?” he says.

  “My niece.”

  “What’s the rope for?”

  “I was putting up wash lines for my auntie. What’s wit’ you, man?”

  Behind him Clete hears an automobile with a gutted muffler turn the corner. “I’m taking you to Central Lockup. Get that grin off your face.”

  Then Clete hears the car with the blown-out muffler accelerating, a hubcap detaching itself from one wheel, bouncing up onto a sidewalk. He turns just as the grillwork of a 1970s gas-guzzler explodes the open door of the panel truck off its hinges and drives it into Clete’s face and body. For just a moment he sees two black men in the front seat of the gas-guzzler, then he is propelled backward into the street, his skin and hair speckled with broken glass. He lands so hard on the asphalt his breath is vacuumed out of his chest in one long, uncontrollable wheezing rush that leaves him powerless and gasping. The gas-guzzler mashes over his porkpie hat and fishtails around a corner at the end of the block. As Clete tries to shove the door off his chest, Andre Rochon fires up his panel truck and roars away in the opposite direction, his red taillights braking once at the intersection before disappearing into the darkness.

  Jimmy Flannigan and Clete’s other friends from the bar pick him up and clean the glass off his clothes and touch him all over like he’s a piece of bruised fruit, amazed that their friend is still alive. Someone even calls 911 and discovers that every cop and emergency vehicle in Orleans Parish is already overloaded with obligations far beyond their capacity. Clete stands dazed and chagrined in the middle of the street, unable to accept the fact he just got taken down by three dirtbags who couldn’t clean bubble gum off their shoes without a diagram.

  He tells his friends to go back inside the bar, then opens the door to the cottage. Inside, a boy not more than seventeen is sitting on the floor, watching a cartoon on a television set, a paper bag packed with clothes resting by his foot. The volume on the television is deafening. “Turn that off,” Clete says.

  The boy does as he is told. He wears the stylized baggy pants and oversized T-shirt of a gangbanger, but his clothes look fresh from the box and his body is so thin it could be made of sticks.

  “Where are your folks?” Clete asks.

  “My auntie already lined up at the ’Dome to get us cots. My Uncle Andre is taking me there in a li’l bit,” the boy replies. “Everybody suppose to bring food for five days. That’s what they say.”

  “Andre Rochon is your uncle?”

  “Yes, suh.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Kevin Rochon.”

  “Your uncle had to take off somewhere. If you’re going to the Superdome, you’ll have to walk.”

  “It ain’t no big deal,” the boy says, and refocuses his attention on the cartoon.

  Right, Clete says to himself.

  He goes back to the bar and dispenses with Scotch and milk and orders a frosted mug of beer and three shot glasses brimming with Beam. Within an hour, he’s as drunk as everyone else in the building, safe inside the sweaty ambiance of jukebox music and manufactured good cheer. His face is oily and hot, his head ringing with nonexistent sounds that are generated by armored vehicles and helicopter blades. Two stranded UCLA co-eds are dancing on the bar, one of them toking on a joint she holds to her lips with roach clips. Jimmy Flannigan fits his hand around the pitted back of Clete’s neck and squeezes, as though grasping a fire hydrant. “I just come back from the Superdome. You ought to see the lines. Everybody from the Iberville Project is trying to pack in there,” he says.

  “Yeah?” Clete replies, unsure of the point.

  “Why they sending everybody from the projects to the ’Dome?” Jimmy asks.

  “It has stadium seating,” Clete says.

  “So why do people from the projects got to have stadium seating?”

  “When Lake Pontchartrain covers the city, maybe some of the poor bastards can find an air pocket under the roof and not drown,” he says. Chapter 5

  O N SUNDAY AFTERNOON in New Iberia, the clouds are gray, the leaves of the live oaks along Main Street riffling with an occasional gust of wind. The end of summer has arrived with a smell of dust and distant rain and smoke from meatfires across the bayou in City Park but with no hint that south of us a churning white vortex of wind and water so great in magnitude that only a satellite photograph can do it justice is grinding its way toward the Louisiana-Mississippi coast.

  As I watch the progress of the storm on the television set I feel like a witness to a holocaust in the making. For two days, the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, has been pleading for help to anyone who will listen. A state emergency official in Metairie has become emotionally undone during an CNN interview, waving his arms, his face blotched like a man coming off a drunk. He states unequivocally that sixty-two thousand people will die if the storm maintains its current category 5 strength and hits New Orleans head-on.

  My adopted daughter, Alafair, just out of Reed College, answers the telephone in the kitchen. I hope the call is from Clete Purcel, agreeing to evacuate from New Orleans and stay at our house. It’s not. The call is from the sheriff of Iberia Parish, Helen Soileau, who has other concerns.

  “We just busted Herman Stanga,” she says. “We got his meth lab and nailed two of his mules.”

  “You know how many times we’ve busted Herman Stanga?”

  “That’s why I want you to supervise the case, Pops. This time we bury him.”

  “Dealing with Herman Stanga is like picking up dog feces with your hands. Get someone else, Helen.”

  “The mules are of more interest to me right now than Stanga. I’ve got both of them in lockup.”

  “What’s interesting about people who have minus signs in front of their IQs?

  “Come on down, check it out.”

  THE BARRED CELL has no windows and smells of the disinfectant that has been used to scrub all its steel and concrete surfaces. The two men locked inside have taken off their shirts and their shoes and are doing push-ups with their feet propped on a wood bench. Their arms and plated chests are blue with Gothic-letter tats. Their armpits are shaved, their lats as hard-looking as the sides of coopered barrels, tapering into twenty-eight-inch waists and stomachs that are flat from the sternum to the groin. With each pushup, a network of ten-dons blooms against the tautness of their skin. They have the hands of bricklayers or men who scrub swimming pools clean with muriatic acid or cut and fashion stone in subfreezing weather. The power in their bodies makes you think of a tightly wound steel spring, aching for release, waiting for the slightest of external triggers.

  One of them stops his exercise routine, sits on the bench, and breathes in and out through his nose, indifferent to the fact that Helen and I are only two feet from him, watching him as we would an animal at a zoo.

  “I dig your tats. Are y’all Eighteenth Streeters?” I say.

  He grins and makes no reply. His hair is cut high and tight, his scalp notched with scars.

  “Latin Kings?” I ask.

  “Who?” he says.

  “How about Mara Salvatrucha?” I say.

  He pauses before he replies, his fingers splaying stiffly on his knees, the soles of his shoes clicking playfully on the f
loor. “Why you think that, man?” he asks.

  “The ‘MS’ tattooed on one eyelid and the ‘13’ on the other were clues,” I say.

  “You nailed me, man,” he says. He looks up into my face, grinning. But the black luster in his eyes is the kind that makes one swallow, not smile in return.

  “I thought you guys were out on the West Coast or creating new opportunities in northern Virginia,” I say.

  His eyes are fixed straight ahead, as though he can see meaning inside the cell’s shadows. Or perhaps he’s staring at images inside his own head, remembering deeds that are testimony to the theory that not all of us descend from the same tree. He bobbles his head back and forth on his shoulders, working out a kink, a prizefighter in the corner awaiting the first-round bell. “When’s chow?” he says.

  “The caterer will be here at six,” Helen says.

  The other man gets off the floor and begins touching his toes, a neat crease folding across his navel, his narrow buttocks turned toward us. I glance at the computer printouts attached to the clipboard in my hand. “Your street name is Chula?” I say to the man sitting on the bench.

  “Yeah, man, you got it.”

  “What’s your name mean?” I ask.

  “‘Put it away,’ man. Like at jai alai? Before the guy slams the ball into the wall, everybody shouts out, ‘Chula! Put it away.’”

  “Y’all got impressive sheets. Lewisburg, Pelican Island, Marion,” I say. “Why fool with a small-town pimp like Herman Stanga?”

  “The black dude? We just stopped and asked for directions. Then cops was all over us,” the seated man says.

  “Yeah, mistakes like that can happen,” I reply. “But here’s the deal, Chula. We’ve got a hurricane blowing in and we don’t have time for bullshit from out-of-town guys who haven’t paid any local dues. See, Louisiana is not a state, it’s a Third World country. That means we really get pissed off when outsiders come in and think they can wipe their feet on us. You guys are mainline, so I won’t try to take you over the hurdles. Stacking time at Angola can be a real bitch, particularly if we decide to send you up with a bad jacket. If you want to take the bounce for Herman Stanga, be our guest. But you either get out in front of this or we’ll crush your cookie bag.”

  The man who has been touching his toes stops and faces me. “Watch this, man,” he says.

  He leaps against the wall with one foot and does a complete somersault, in a wink returning to an upright position. “What you think about that? Learned it in El Sal from the guys who killed my whole family and took turns raping me before they sold me to a carnival. Come on, man, tell me what you think about that.”

  “To be honest, I think you should have stayed with the carnival,” I reply.

  The remark isn’t intended to sink the hook in. But inadvertently that is what happens. Just when Helen and I are almost out of the corridor, the man street-named Chula rakes a tin cup back and forth on the bars. “Hey, you, the guy with the maricona, my sister is fucking a junkie priest from New Iberia. You say we ain’t paid no dues here? That ain’t local dues, man?”

  Helen returns to the cell door, her arms pumped. “What did you call me?” she says.

  Chula shrugs and smiles self-effacingly. “It don’t mean nothing against you. Your friend there shouldn’t have made fun about somebody being sold to a carnival,” he says. He leans against the wall, detaching from the world around him, his face striped with the bars’ shadows.

  BACK HOME, I try to forget the two men in the holding cell. Molly, my wife, is a former nun and once worked with the Maryknolls in Central America. She has freckles on her shoulders and dark red hair that is thick and clipped short on her neck. She and Alafair are picking up the garden tools in the backyard and locking them in a tin shed behind the porte cochere. The air is breathless, cool, rain-scented, the live oak and pecan trees and the bayou as still as images in a painting. “Did Clete call?” I ask.

  “No, but I called him. He’s not going to evacuate,” Molly says. She studies my face. She knows I’m not thinking about Clete. “Did something happen at the jail?”

  “A local priest named Jude LeBlanc fell through a hole in the dimension about a year ago. He has terminal cancer and a morphine addiction and three or four warrants out for his arrest.”

  The truth is, I don’t want to talk about it. If age brings wisdom, it lies in the realization that most talk is useless and that you stay out of other people’s grief.

  “What’s that have to do with the jail?” Molly asks.

  “A member of an El salvadoran gang called MS-13 said his sister was in the sack with Jude.”

  “Did you ask him where your friend was?”

  “You never empower the perps, no matter how many aces they’re holding,” I say.

  A hard gust of wind blows down the long corridor of trees that line Bayou Teche, wrinkling the water like old skin, filling the air with the smell of fish roe and leaves that have turned yellow and black in the shade. Katrina will make landfall somewhere around Lake Pontchartrain in the next seven hours.

  “Let’s fix supper,” she says.

  “I don’t have much of an appetite,” I say.

  Her face looks dry and empty, her cheeks slightly sunken. She lets out her breath. “God, those poor people,” she says.

  HURRICANES DO NOT lend themselves to description, no more than do the pyrotechnics of a B-52 raid at ground zero. I have seen the survivors of the latter. Their grief is of a kind you never want to witness. They weep and make mewing sounds. Any words they speak are usually unintelligible. I have always suspected they have joined a group the Bible refers to as Heaven’s prisoners, anointed in a fashion most of us would resist even if we recognized God’s finger reaching out to touch our brow.

  A category 5 hurricane carries an explosive force several times greater than that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. But unlike a man-made weapon of mass destruction, a hurricane creates an environment that preempts our natural laws. Early on the air turns a chemical green and contains a density that you can hold in your palm. The lightning and the thunder arrive almost like predictable friends, then fade into the ether and seem to become little more than a summer squall. Rain rings chain the swells between the whitecaps and the wind smells of salt spray and hard-packed sand that has warmed under the sun. You wonder if all the preparedness and alarm hasn’t been much ado about nothing.

  Then the tide seems to shrink from the land, as though a giant drainhole has formed in the center of the Gulf. Palm trees straighten in the stillness, their fronds suddenly lifeless. You swallow to stop the popping sound in your ears, with the same sense of impotence you might experience aboard a plane that is dramatically losing altitude. To the south, a long black hump begins to gather itself on the earth’s rim, swelling out of the water like an enormous whale, extending itself all across the horizon. You cannot believe what you are watching. The black hump is now rushing toward the coastline, gaining momentum and size, increasing in velocity so rapidly that its own crest is absorbed by the wave before it can crash to the surface in front of it.

  It’s called a tidal surge. Its force can turn a levee system into serpentine lines of black sand or level a city, particularly when the city has no natural barriers. The barrier islands off the Louisiana coast have long ago eroded away or been dredged up and heaped on barges and sold for shale parking lots. The petrochemical companies have cut roughly ten thousand miles of channels through the wetlands, allowing saline intrusion to poison and kill freshwater marsh areas from Plaquemines Parish to Sabine Pass. The levees along the Mississippi River shotgun hundreds of tons of mud over the edge of the continental shelf, preventing it from flowing westward along the coastline, where it is needed the most. Louisiana’s wetlands continue to disappear at a rate of forty-seven square miles a year.

  It’s 1:00 a.m. and I can hear the wind in the oaks and pecan trees. The ventilated shutters on our house are latched, vibrating slightly against the jambs. The only s
ign of a weather disturbance is a flicker of lightning in the clouds or a sudden gust of rain that patterns our tin roof with pine needles. Two hours to the east of us the people of New Orleans who have not evacuated are watching their city ripped off the face of the earth. Why is one group spared and one group not? I don’t have an answer. But I am determined that two newly arrived members of our community will not enjoy the safety of our jail, at least on their terms, while decent people are drowned in their own homes.

  I call the night jailer and tell him to separate the two MS-13 members.

  “What if they ax me why?” he says.

  “Tell them we have a policy against homosexuals sharing the same cell in Iberia Parish,” I reply.

  “Tell them what?”

  A half hour later I drive to my office and read again through the faxes and computer printouts on the two MS-13 members. There are always dials on the perps. It’s just a matter of finding them. The perps might be con-wise and they may have the cunning of animals, but when it comes to successfully confronting the system, they’re charging uphill into a howitzer.

  I check my firearm at the entrance to the lockup area and ask the night jailer to bring Felix “Chula” Ramos to the interrogation room. When Chula arrives, his body is clinking with waist and leg chains. He is wearing only a pair of white boxer undershorts and they look strangely innocuous against his tattooed skin.

  “Lose the restraints, Cap?”

  The night jailer is old and has gin roses in his face. He is not interested in either the thespian behavior of others or saving them from themselves. “Holler on the gate,” he says.

  Chula sits at the government-surplus metal table and takes my inventory, one hand relaxed on the tabletop. “I could rip out your throat. Before you could even beg, that fast,” he says, snapping his fingers.

  I pinch the fatigue out of my eyes. “Your fall partner, what’s-his-name, Luis, is an ignoramus, but I think you’re even dumber than he is.”