The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  I held the old woman upright in the wheelchair while Clete covered her head and upper body with the box. Then I smelled an odor from her clothes that brought back memories of a distant war that I wanted to forget.

  “You think that’s bad. Go inside the Center. All the plumbing is broken. There’re dead people piled in the corners. Street rats are shooting guns in there and raping anybody they want,” Clete said. “You got a spare piece?”

  “No, where’s your hideaway?”

  “Lost it on Royal, I think. A whole balcony came down on the street. I got hit with a flying flowerpot.” He wiped the sweat out of his eyes with the flat of his hand and stared out at the wreckage of the city and the looters sloshing through the streets, their arms loaded with whatever they could carry. “Who needs terrorists? Look at this shit, will you?”

  FOR THOSE WHO do not like to brood upon the possibility of simian ancestry in the human gene pool or who genuinely believe that societal virtue grows from a collective impulse in the human breast, the events of the next few days would offer their sensibilities poor comfort. Helen had been worried she would have to give up command of her department to either NOPD or state or federal authorities. That was the least of our problems. There was no higher command than ourselves. The command structure and communication system of NOPD had been destroyed by the storm. Four hundred to five hundred officers, roughly one third of the department, had bagged ass for higher ground. The command center NOPD had set up in a building off Canal Street had flooded. Much to their credit, the duty officers didn’t give up their positions and wandered in chest-deep water outside their building for two days. They had no food and no drinking water, and many were forced to relieve themselves in their clothes, their handheld radios held aloft to keep them dry.

  From a boat or any other elevated position, as far as the eye could see, New Orleans looked like a Caribbean city that had collapsed beneath the waves. The sun was merciless in the sky, the humidity like lines of ants crawling inside your clothes. The linear structure of a neighborhood could be recognized only by the green smudge of yard trees that cut the waterline and row upon row of rooftops dotted with people who perched on sloped shingles that scalded their hands.

  The smell was like none I ever experienced. The water was chocolate-brown, the surface glistening with a blue-green sheen of oil and industrial chemicals. Raw feces and used toilet paper issued from broken sewer lines. The gray, throat-gagging odor of decomposition permeated not only the air but everything we touched. The bodies of dead animals, including deer, rolled in the wake of our rescue boats. And so did those of human beings, sometimes just a shoulder or an arm or the back of a head, suddenly surfacing, then sinking under the froth.

  They drowned in attics and on the second floors of their houses. They drowned along the edges of Highway 23 when they tried to drive out of Plaquemines Parish. They drowned in retirement homes and in trees and on car tops while they waved frantically at helicopters flying by overhead. They died in hospitals and nursing homes of dehydration and heat exhaustion, and they died because an attending nurse could not continue to operate a hand ventilator for hours upon hours without rest.

  If by chance you hear a tape of the 911 cell phone calls from those attics, walk away from it as quickly as possible, unless you are willing to live with voices that will come aborning in your sleep for the rest of your life.

  The United States Coast Guard flew nonstop, coming in low with the sun at their backs, taking sniper fire, swinging from cables, the downdraft of their choppers cutting a trough across the water. They took the children, the elderly, and the sick first and tried to come back for the others later. They chopped holes in roofs and strapped hoists on terrified people who had never flown in an airplane. They held infants against their breasts and fat women who weighed three hundred pounds, and carried them above the water to higher ground with a grace we associate with angels. They rescued more than thirty-three thousand souls, and no matter what else happens in our history, no group will ever exceed the level of courage and devotion they demonstrated following Katrina’s landfall.

  After sunset on the first day, August 29, the sky was an ink wash, streaked with smoke from fires vandals had set in the Garden District. There were also electrical moments, flashes of light in the sky, heat lightning or perhaps sometimes the igneous trajectory of tracer rounds fired from automatic weapons. The rule books were going over the gunwales.

  Looters were hitting pharmacies and liquor and jewelry stores first, then working their way down the buffet table. A rogue group of NOPD cops had actually set up a thieves headquarters on the tenth floor of a downtown hotel, storing their loot in the rooms, terrorizing the management, and threatening to shoot a reporter who tried to question them. New Orleans cops also drove off with automobiles from the Cadillac agency. Gangbangers had converged on the Garden District and were having a Visigoth holiday, burning homes built before the Civil War, carrying away whatever wasn’t bolted down.

  Evacuees in the Superdome and Convention Center tried to walk across the bridge into Jefferson Parish. Most of these people were black, some carrying children in their arms, all of them exhausted, hungry, and dehydrated. They were met by armed police officers from Jefferson Parish who fired shotguns over their heads and allowed none of them to leave Orleans Parish.

  An NOPD cop shot a black man with a twelve-gauge through the glass window of his cruiser in front of the Convention Center while hundreds of people watched. The cop sped away before the crowd attacked his vehicle. Some witnesses said he ran over the victim’s body. The cop claimed the dead man had tried to attack him with a pair of scissors.

  A half block from a state medical clinic I counted the bodies of nine black people, all of them floating facedown in a circle, like free-falling parachutists suspended on a cushion of air high above the earth.

  We heard stories of gunfire from rooftops and windows. Emergency personnel in rescue boats became afraid of the very people they were supposed to save. Some people airlifted out by the Coast Guard in the Lower Nine said the gunfire was a desperate attempt to signal the boat crews searching in the darkness for survivors. Who was telling the truth? What cop or fireman or volunteer kneeling on the bow of a rescue boat, preparing to throw a rope on a rooftop, wanted to find out? Who wanted to eat a round from an AK-47?

  Charity and Baptist Memorial hospitals had become necropolises. The bottom floors were flooded, and gangbangers turned over rescue boats that were trying to evacuate the patients. Without electricity or ice or unspoiled food or running water, hospital personnel were left to care for the most helpless of their wards-trauma victims with fresh gunshot wounds, those whose bodily functions depended entirely upon machines, patients who had just had organs surgically removed, and the most vulnerable group, the aged and the terrified, all of it inside a building that was cooking in its own stink.

  But a lot of NOPD cops were loyal to their badge and their oath and worked tirelessly alongside the rest of us for the next seventy-two hours. Among their number were many of Clete’s longtime detractors and enemies, but even the most vehement of them had to concede that Clete Purcel was a beautiful man to have on our side-the kind who covers your back, tightens your slack, and humps your pack. He knew every street and rat hole in New Orleans, and he had also fished every bayou and bay and canal from Barataria to Lake Borgne. He was on a first-name basis with hookers, Murphy artists, petty boosters, whiskey priests, junkies, skin bar operators, transvestites, disgraced cops, strippers, second-story creeps, street mutts, bondsmen, journalists, and old-time Mobsters who tended their flower gardens in the suburbs. His bravery was a given. His indifference to physical pain or verbal insult was vinegar and gall to his enemies, his loyalty to his friends of such an abiding nature that with conscious forethought he would willingly lay down his life for them.

  But even Katrina did not change Clete’s penchant for the visceral and the sybaritic. On August 31 he said he was going to check his apartment and office o
n St. Ann in the Quarter. Two hours passed and no Clete. It was afternoon and Helen and I were in a boat out in Gentilly, surrounded by water and houses that were beginning to smell from the bodies inside. The combination of heat and humidity and lack of wind was almost unbearable, the sun like a wobbling yellow balloon trapped under the water’s surface. Helen cut the engine and let us drift on our wake until we were in the shade of an elevated stretch of Interstate 10. Her face and arms were badly sunburned, her shirt stiff with dried salt.

  “Go find him,” she said.

  “Clete can take care of himself,” I said.

  “We need every swinging dick on the line. Tell him to get his ass back here.”

  “That’s what Nate Baxter used to say.”

  “Remind me to scrub out my mouth with Ajax,” she replied.

  I caught a ride on another boat to high ground, then walked the rest of the way into the Quarter. The Quarter had taken a pounding from the wind and the rain, and ventilated shutters had been shattered off their hinges and the planked floors of whole balconies stripped clean from the buildings and sent flying like undulating rows of piano keys down the street. But the Quarter had not flooded and some of the bars, using gasoline-powered generators, had stayed on the full-tilt boogie for three days-their patrons zoned and marinated to the point they looked like waxworks figures that had been left under a heat lamp.

  I found Clete in a corner dump two blocks from his office, his tropical shirt and cream-colored slacks black with oil, his skin peeling with sun blisters, his face glowing from the huge mug of draft beer he was drinking and the whiskey jigger rolling around inside it. A brunette woman in a halter and cutoff blue-jean shorts and spiked heels was drinking next to him, her thigh touching his. The tops of her breasts were tattooed with chains of roses, her neck strung with purple and green glass beads, her mascara running like a clown’s.

  “Time to dee-dee, Cletus,” I said.

  “Lighten up, big mon. Have a soda and lime. The guy’s got cold shrimp on dry ice,” he said.

  “You’re shit-faced.”

  “So what? This is Dominique. She’s an artist from Paris. We’re going over to my place for a while. Did you see that big plane that flew over?”

  “No, I didn’t. Step outside with me.”

  “It was Air Force One. After three days the Shrubster did a fly-over. Gee, I feel better now.”

  “Did you hear me?”

  He leaned over the counter, filled his mug from the tap, and poured a jigger of Beam into it. He upended the mug, drinking it to the bottom, his eyes fastened on mine. He smiled, his face suffused with warmth. “This is our country, big mon. We fought for it,” he said. “I say screw all these cocksuckers. Nobody jacks the Big Sleazy when the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are on the job.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. But in AA you do not try to reason with drunks. In Clete Purcel’s case, you did not invade the private cathedral where he sometimes lived.

  “I’ll tell Helen you’ll catch us later,” I said.

  He laid the full weight of his big arm across my shoulders and walked with me to the door. The cloud of testosterone and beer sweat that rose from his armpit was suffocating.

  “Give me an hour. I just need to clean up and fix some supper for me and Dominique,” he said.

  “Supper?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “That woman isn’t from France. She used to work in a massage parlor in Lafayette. She was one of Stevie Giacano’s whores.”

  “Who’s perfect? You’ve got something negative to say about every woman I meet.”

  “That’s a comment on your judgment, not mine.”

  I saw the hurt flicker in his face before I could take back my words. He took his arm from my shoulders and stepped out on the sidewalk. The street was strewn with plaster, broken glass, chimney bricks, beer cans and red plastic beer cups, roofing shingles, and thousands of water beetles that had been forced up through the sewer grates and that snapped under your feet when you stepped on them. But in the waning of the afternoon, in the pool of shadow made by the building at our back, in the popping of a Mardi Gras flag someone had hung on a staff from a balcony, I felt for just a moment that an older and fonder vision of New Orleans might still be available to us.

  “I’m sorry for what I said, Clete.”

  His eyes crinkled, threading with white lines at the corners. He pulled a slip of paper out of his shirt pocket with two fingers and offered it to me. “Aside from her painting career, Dominique coincidentally knows every working girl in the Quarter. You still want to find that junkie priest who’s hooked up with the sister of the MS-13 dude?” he said.

  You didn’t put the slide or the glide on Clete Purcel.

  Chapter 7

  ON OUR WAY back to rendezvous with Helen, we stopped at the second-story apartment where Jude LeBlanc lived with the Hispanic woman by the name of Natalia Ramos. But the apartment door was locked and the shutters latched. A neighbor, a Cajun woman who had ridden out the storm, said Jude had left the apartment for the Ninth Ward on Friday afternoon and Natalia had decided to join him. “I heard there’s bad t’ings happening down there. Maybe they ain’t coming back, no,” the neighbor said.

  “Do you know where they went in the Ninth?” I asked.

  “There’s a church down there that don’t ax no questions about him. Natalia said it’s made of stucco and got a bell tower,” she replied.

  “Thank you,” I said, and started to go.

  “Hey, you?” the neighbor said.

  “Yes?”

  “Maybe he ain’t doing right, a priest living wit’ a woman and all, but that’s a good man, yeah.”

  That night was one of surreal images that I suspect have their origins more in the unconscious than in the conscious mind. People looked and behaved as they do in our sleep-not quite real, their bodies iridescent with sweat, their clothes in rags, like creatures living out their destinies on moonscape.

  I saw a man rowing a boat, vigorously pulling on the oars, his back turned toward two bodies that were piled in the bow, his face set with stoic determination, as though his efforts could undo fate’s worst cut.

  I saw a black baby hung in the branches of a tree, its tiny hands trailing in the current, its plastic diaper immaculate in the moonlight. I saw people eating from plastic packages of mustard and ketchup they had looted from a café, dividing what they had among themselves. Ten feet from them a dead cow matted with flies lay in the back of a wrecked pickup, a lead rope twisted around its neck.

  A gelatinous fat man wearing boxer trunks and mirrored sunglasses floated past us on a bed of inner tubes, a twelve-pack of beer balanced on his stomach, one hand held high in a toast to a passing airboat.

  “You want a ride up to high ground?” I said.

  “And miss the show? Are you kidding?” he replied, ripping open another beer.

  I saw kids running from an antebellum home they had just torched, silhouetted against the flames, like pranksters trick-or-treating on Halloween. When the gas lines exploded, sparks showered down on the entire neighborhood. Two blocks away vigilantes with shotguns and deer rifles prowled the flooded streets in a bass boat powered by an electric motor. One of them wore a headlamp, another a safari hat with a leopard-skin band. They were all sharing drinks from a silver flask and happy as hogs rolling in shit. I don’t know if they found their prey or not. In fact, at the time I was too tired to care.

  We heard rumors that teams of elite troops, Special Forces or Rangers or Navy SEALs, were taking out snipers under a black flag. We heard that an alligator ate a deer on the second story of a flooded house by the Industrial Canal. Some NOPD cops said the personnel at Orleans Parish Prison had blown town and left the inmates to drown. Others said a downtown Mob rushed a command center, thinking food and water were being distributed. A deputy panicked and began firing an automatic weapon into the night sky, quickly adding to the widespread conviction that cops were arbitrarily
killing innocent people.

  The number of looters and arsonists and dangerous felons in custody was growing by the hour, with no place to put them. We kicked looters loose, only to see them recycled back into a temporary holding area two hours later. Some of those in custody were probably murderers-drug dealers or sociopaths who had taken advantage of the storm to eliminate the competition or settle old grudges. When a chain-link jail was created at the airport, we started packing the worst of the bunch into school buses for the trip up I-10 into Jefferson Parish.

  That’s when I heard a woman on a wrist chain screaming at an Iberia deputy who was trying to push her up onto the steps of a waiting bus. She sat down heavily on the curb, pulling others down with her.

  “What’s going on, Top?” I asked the deputy.

  “She spit on a fireman and scratched his face. She started yelling about a priest on a church roof,” the deputy said. “I think she’s nuts. She was also holding a few pharmaceuticals.”

  The woman looked Hispanic and wore a filthy purple sundress with bone-colored flowers printed on it. Her hair and skin were greasy with oil, her bare feet bloody.

  “Who’s the priest?” I asked her.

  She looked up at me. “Father LeBlanc,” she answered.

  “Jude LeBlanc?” I asked.

  “You know him?” she said.

  “I knew a priest by that name in New Iberia. Where is he?”

  “In the Lower Nine, at St. Mary Magdalene. He filled in there sometimes because they ain’t got no regular priest.”

  “Can you kick her loose?” I asked the deputy.

  “Gladly,” the deputy said, leaning down to the chain with his cuff key.