DR16 - The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  Bertrand stuck the bundled bills in the bag, his eyes dancing in the glow of the flashlight. “Don’t worry about it.”

  A third man entered the room. He had pulled off a gold-and-purple T-shirt and wadded it up and was using it to mop the sweat off his chest and out of his armpits. He wore paint-splattered slacks and tennis shoes without socks. Whiskers grew on his chin like strands of black wire. “Kevin thinks he saw a guy out in the street,” he said.

  “That kid’s been wetting his pants all night. I told you not to bring him,” Bertrand said.

  “He’s just saying what he saw, man,” the third man said. His eyes dropped to Bertrand’s waistline and the Ziploc bag that protruded from his trousers. “Where’d you get the blow?”

  “Same place we got the thirty-eight. Now go take care of Kevin. We gonna be right there. I don’t want to be hearing about nobody out in the street, either. It’s Michael Jackson and Thriller out there. This city is a graveyard and we own the shovels and the headstones. Motherfucker come in here, he gonna eat one of these thirty-eights. You hear me, Andre? Get your ass downstairs and bring up the boat. And don’t be cranking it till we there.”

  “What y’all got in the laundry bag?” the third man said.

  “Andre, what it take for you to understand?” Bertrand said.

  “I’m just axing,” the third man replied. “We in this together, ain’t we?”

  “That’s right. So go do what he say,” Eddy said.

  Andre huffed air out his nostrils and disappeared down the stairway. Bertrand tapped one fist on top of the other, his gaze roving around the room. “There’s more. I can feel it. I can smell money in the walls,” he said.

  “What you smell is them flowers all over the place. What kind of people put flower vases in every room in the house right before a hurricane?” Eddy said.

  The question was a legitimate one. Who could afford to place fresh bowls of roses and orchids and carnations in a dozen rooms every three or four days? Who would want to? Bertrand stared at the water stains in the wallpaper and pushed against the softness of the lathwork underneath, his stomach on fire, rivulets of sweat running out of his bandana. “These walls is busting wit’ it, Eddy. It’s a drop or something,” he said.

  “Give it up, man,” Eddy said. “It’s burning up in here. It must be a hundred and twenty degrees.”

  Bertrand looked hard at his brother and grimaced as his ulcers flared again. This could be the perfect score. Why did his insides have to betray him now, why was his head always full of broken glass? Why wasn’t anything easy?

  “All right,” he said, drawing a quiet breath.

  “That’s better,” Eddy said. “You’re always grieving, man, firing yourself up over things you cain’t change. We ain’t made the world. Time to enjoy life, not worry so much all the time.”

  Both of them went downstairs, the flashlight’s beam bouncing in front of them. Then Bertrand clicked off the light and the two of them climbed into the boat with Andre and his nephew. The sky was orange from a fire on the next block and inside the smoke and mist and humidity the air smelled like garbage burning on a cold day at the City dump.

  Bertrand looked back over his shoulder at the house. For some reason that he couldn’t understand, he felt his entry into this deserted, antebellum structure had just changed his life in a fashion that was irreversible. But for good or bad? Why were knives always whirling inside him?

  Suddenly, like a camera shutter opening in his mind, he saw a young girl fighting against the polyethylene rope that bound her arms and ankles, thrashing her feet against the floor of a panel truck, her stuffed bear lying beside her. He shook the image out of his head and pointed his face into the wind as their aluminum boat sped down the flooded alleyway, trash cans bobbing in the engine’s wake, helicopters flying overhead to airlift the most desperate of the desperate from the hospital in which Bertrand Melancon had been born.

  space

  It was close to midnight before Otis dressed for bed. He removed the cartridge from the chamber of the Springfield, pressed it back down in the magazine, and locked down the bolt. He propped the rifle by a dormer window that gave an encompassing view of the front yard, checked all the doors again, and kissed Thelma good night. Then he made an old-fashioned for both himself and Melanie and took them up to the bedroom on a silver tray with three pieces of chocolate on it.

  “What’s all this for?” she asked.

  “We owe ourselves a treat. Tomorrow will be a fine day. I genuinely believe it will.”

  She wore a pink nightgown and had been reading on top of the sheets. The gasoline-powered generators could not adequately support the air-conditioning system, but the attic fan was on and her bare shoulders looked cool and lovely in the breeze through the window. She placed her book on the floor and bit into a square of French chocolate, pushing little pieces of it back into her mouth with her fingertips. She smiled at him. “Turn out the light,” she said.

  Later, when Otis fell asleep, his thoughts were peaceful, his body drained of all the rage and turmoil that had beset his life since his daughter was attacked. His home had survived Katrina. His wife was his wife again. And he had gone after his daughter’s attackers with both firmness of purpose and a measure of mercy. More important, he had made his house a safe harbor in a time of societal collapse, the front yard and driveway pooled with an apron of light that held back the darkness and the men who prowled it. A man could have done worse.

  INSIDE THE BACK of the looted Rite Aid drugstore, Bertrand Melancon felt like fire ants were eating the lining of his stomach. Andre and his nephew still didn’t know about the bundled cash in the laundry bag, but it was only a matter of time before they either saw it or figured out why Eddy was acting hinky. Maybe it was better to split the loot fair and square and be done with it, he thought. The Rite Aid had been ripped apart and was in complete darkness, but it was a good place to cool out, do a few lines of the high-grade flake from the house full of flowers, and work things out. Yeah, that was it. Don’t stiff nobody and you don’t got to be watching your back all the time. But dividing up cold cash that he found, that he ripped out of the wall, wasn’t going to be easy. On several levels, personal and otherwise.

  “Look, me and Eddy got a surprise for you. That last house had some money in a wall. We’re gonna give y’all your cut now, in case something go sout’ and some of us get picked up,” Bertrand said.

  There was no sound in the room. Andre was seated on a metal desk, drinking from a warm can of Coca-Cola he’d found under a destroyed display rack out front. He had thrown away his soiled LSU T-shirt and in the flashes of heat lightning through the window his skin was the color of dusty leather, his nipples like brown dimes. “How come we just hearing about that now?” he asked.

  Bertrand slapped a mosquito on his neck and studied it. “’Cause I didn’t want no complications back there,” he said. “’Cause I don’t be explaining everything as we go. ’Cause you getting cut in on what you ain’t found, Andre, wit’ an equal share for your young relative here, even though you and him ain’t had nothing to do wit’ finding the money. If I was you, I’d show some humbleness and be thankful for what I got.”

  “The split’s always been fair, ain’t it?” Eddy said.

  “If it ain’t been fair, I wouldn’t have no way of knowing, would I?” Andre said.

  But Bertrand no longer cared if Andre believed him and Eddy or not. That house back there on the flooded alley was creaking with cash-ola. Ten more minutes with the ball-peen and the crowbar and he would have had the upstairs walls peeled down to the floor. Bertrand could see stacks of cash tumbling out on his shoe tops.

  He looked at his watch. It was one in the morning. He and Eddy could be at the alley in less than a half hour, cut the engine, and hand-pull the boat in from the side street. Nobody would even know they were there. Because they already knew the layout they could probably work inside without flashlights. This was the big score, man. He’d done ri
ght by Andre and his nephew and it was time to get back into action. Screw this diplomacy shit.

  “Me and Eddy are going back. Y’all stay here,” Bertrand said.

  Andre pinched his abs, his eyes empty, his mouth pursed. “How come we get left behind?”

  “Let me ax you a better question,” Bertrand said. “How come you always feeling yourself up?”

  “Why don’t you lay off me, man? Case you ain’t noticed, the buses and the streetcar ain’t running,” Andre said. “We suppose to carry our loot t’rou town?”

  “Andre’s right, man. One for all and all for one. We all going back together,” Eddy said. He lit a cigarette and blew out smoke without removing the cigarette from his lips. He looked at Andre’s nephew. “You up for that, my li’l brother?”

  Kevin was seated on the floor, eating a fried pie, his springy hair bright with sweat. He wiped his mouth with his shirt. “I ain’t scared,” he said.

  Bertrand wanted to shove Eddy’s head into a commode.

  OTIS SLEPT THE sleep of the dead, his wife’s hip nestled against him, the attic fan drawing a breeze across their bodies. He dreamed of his parents and the tiny yellow house he had grown up in. In the spring the grass was always cool in the evening and full of clover, and when his father came home from work at the sawmill, they played a game of pitch-and-catch in the front yard. There were cows and horses in a field behind the house, and a big hackberry tree in the side yard that shaded the roof during the hottest hours of the day. Otis had always loved the house he had grown up in and he had loved his family and had always believed he was loved by them in return.

  He believed this right up to the Indian-summer afternoon his father discovered his wife’s infidelity and shot her lover to death on the steps of the Baptist church where he served as pastor, then came home and was shot down and killed by a volunteer constable who had once been his fishing partner.

  Otis sat straight up in bed. Then he went into the bathroom and tried to wash his face in the lavatory. The faucet made a loud, squeaking sound, and a pipe vibrated dryly in the wall.

  “What was that?” Melanie said from the bed.

  “It’s just me. I forgot the water was off.”

  “I thought I heard something outside.”

  He walked back into the bedroom, his bare feet padding on the carpet. All he could hear was the steady drone of the attic fan and the wind in the trees on the north side of the house. He looked out on the street. The moon had broken out of the clouds and created a black glaze on the surface of the floodwater. A solitary palm frond rustled against the side of a tree trunk on the neutral ground and a trash can turned in an eddy by a plugged storm drain.

  “I had a bad dream. I was probably talking in my sleep,” he said.

  “Are you sure no one is out there?”

  “I never told you how my father died.”

  She raised herself on her elbow, her face lined from the pillow. “I thought he had leukemia.”

  “He did. But that’s not how he died. He was shot to death by a friend of his, a constable. He was going to kill my mother,” Otis said. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring into space, his back to his wife, when he said this.

  The room was silent a long time. When he lay back down, Melanie took his hand in hers. “Otis?” she said, looking up into the darkness.

  “Yes?”

  “We mustn’t ever tell anyone about this. That is not what happened in your family.”

  In the glow of moonlight through the window, her face looked as though it had been sculpted in alabaster.

  “Say that again?” Otis asked.

  “You’re a respected insurance executive in New Orleans. That’s what you will remain. That story you just told me has no application in our lives today.”

  “Mel?” he began.

  “Please. I’ve told you not to call me that, Otis. It’s not a lot to ask.”

  Otis went downstairs to the den and lay down on a black leather couch, a cushion over his head, his ears ringing with a sound like wind in seashells.

  space

  BERTRAND COULDN’T give up his resentment toward Eddy all the way back to the house where he’d found the cash and dope and the .38 snub. Eddy loved playing the big shot, handing out favors to people, screwing a cigarette in his mouth, firing it up with a Zippo, snapping the lid back tight, like he was the dude in control. Except Eddy was being generous with what wasn’t his to be generous with, in this case the biggest score of their lives. Andre was sitting backward on the bow of the boat, like he was lookout man, scanning the horizon, some kind of commando about to take down osama bin Laden.

  What a pair of jokers. Maybe it was time to cut both of them loose.

  But the real reason for Bertrand’s resentment of Eddy and Andre had little to do with the score at the house and he knew it. Every time he looked into their faces he saw his own face, and what he saw there set his stomach on fire again.

  Maybe he could get away from Andre and Eddy and start over somewhere else. Forget about what they had done when they were stoned. Yeah, maybe he could even make up for it, write those girls a note and mail it to the newspaper from another city. It hadn’t been his idea anyway. It was Eddy who always had a thing about young white girls, always saying sick stuff when they pulled up to them next to a red light. Andre had been a sex freak ever since he got turned out in the Lafourche Parish Prison. Bertrand never got off hurting people.

  But no matter how many times Bertrand went over the assault on the two victims, he could not escape one conclusion about his participation: He had entered into it willingly, and when he saw revulsion in the face of the girl they had taken out of the car with the dead battery, he had done it to her with greater violence than either his brother or Andre.

  In these moments he hated himself and sometimes even wished someone would drive a bullet through his brain and stop the thoughts that kept his stomach on fire.

  The street was completely dark, except for one house where the owner obviously had his own generators working. Eddy cut the engine at the end of the block and let the boat drift through mounds of partially submerged oak limbs into the side yard of the house they had creeped three hours earlier.

  In minutes the four of them were ripping the Sheetrock and lathwork and plaster off the studs in every room in the house. In fact, it was fun tearing the place apart. The air and carpets were white with dust, the flower vases smashed and the flowers scattered, the kitchen a shambles, electric wiring hanging like spaghetti out of the walls.

  “This motherfucker gonna brown his drawers when he come home,” Eddy said. “Hey, man, dig Andre in the kitchen.”

  Bertrand couldn’t believe it. Andre had unbuttoned his trousers and was looping a high arc of urine into the sink.

  “That’s sick, man,” Bertrand said.

  “You’re right,” Andre answered. He spun around and hosed down the stove and an opened drawer that was full of seasoning, saving out enough for the icebox.

  That was it, Bertrand said to himself. He was splitting.

  Then Eddy splintered a chunk of plywood out of the pantry ceiling with his crowbar, and a cascade of bundled fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills poured down on his head. “Oh man, you was right from the jump, Bertrand, this is a motherfucking bank.”

  The four of them began scooping up the money, throwing it into a vinyl garbage bag, Bertrand estimating the count as each pack of bills thudded into the bottom of the bag. He ran out of math in the sixty-thousand range.

  “We rich,” Andre said. “We rich, man. We rich. Ain’t nobody gonna believe this.”

  “That’s right, ’Cause you ain’t gonna tell them,” Bertrand said.

  “Hey, man, Andre’s cool. Don’t be talking to a brother like that,” Eddy said.

  “Eddy, I want you to clean the wax out of your ears and hear this real good. That’s the last time you’re gonna act like you big shit at my expense,” Bertrand said.

  “Hey, like Andre say, we all
rich. We ain’t got time to be fighting among ourselves,” Kevin said. “We gonna burn the house? I mean, to get rid of the fingerprints and all?”

  The three older men stared at him with their mouths open.

  UP THE STREET, on the other side of the neutral ground, Tom Claggart and two friends had nodded off on pallets they had laid out on Claggart’s living room floor, hoping to catch the faint breeze that puffed through the doorway and to avoid as much as possible the layers of heat that had mushroomed against the ceilings. Their pistols and shotguns and hunting rifles were oiled and loaded and propped against the divan or hung on the backs of chairs. Their boxes of brass cartridges and shotgun shells were placed neatly on the mantel above the fireplace. All their empty beer cans and bread wrappers and empty containers of corn beef and boneless turkey and mustard and horseradish and dirty paper plates and plastic forks and spoons were wrapped and sealed in odor-proof bags. When one of them had to relieve himself, he did so in the backyard and took an entrenching tool with him.

  No hunting camp could have been neater or better regulated. There was only one problem. Tom Claggart and his friends had not been presented with an opportunity to discharge a round all night, even though they and several others had made probes by boat and on foot into two adjoining neighborhoods where sparks from burning houses drifted through the live oaks like fireflies.

  It seemed hardly fair.

  “DON’T GO BACK by that lighted house, man. Go back the way we come,” Bertrand said from the bow of the boat.

  “No, man, we’re hauling ass. We ain’t bothered them people. They ain’t gonna bother us,” Eddy said, sitting sideways in the stern, opening up the throttle.

  “You just don’t listen, man,” Bertrand said, his words lost in the roar of the engine.

  The boat swerved through clumps of broken tree limbs in the street and raked on the curbing along the neutral ground. Andre was laughing, sticking his hand down in the vinyl bag to feel the tightly packed bundles of cash there, his nephew eating one of the candy bars he’d found in the Rite Aid. The wind had cleared the smoke off the street, and the water was black, stained with a rainbow slick, a busted main pumping a geyser in the air like a fountain in the park. If Bertrand got out of this with his share of the score intact, he was leaving New Orleans forever, starting over in a new place, maybe out on the West Coast, where people lived in regular neighborhoods, with parks and beaches and nice supermarkets close by. Yeah, a place where it was always seventy-five degrees and he could open a restaurant or a car wash with the money from the score and tool down palm-lined avenues in a brand-new convertible, Three 6 Mafia blaring from the speakers.