The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  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 try 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.”

  “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

  ON 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 floor. “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, Ch
ula. 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.