The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  No, it had to be an eye for an eye, he thought. Thelma had identified only two of the four men as her attackers. He could not kill arbitrarily, if in fact he was capable of killing at all. It was easier to think about than to do it. When the test came, could he pull the trigger? Was he willing to join the ranks of men like Tom Claggart and his friends?

  But if the looters threatened him, if they were armed or they refused to halt, that would be another matter, wouldn’t it?

  A house burst into flame on the next block, orange sparks twisting high in the sky. In the distance he could hear gunfire and he could see a helicopter trying to land on a hospital roof, and he wondered if snipers were shooting at it. His hands were damp on the stock of the rifle, his eyes stinging with sweat. When he swallowed, his saliva tasted as metallic as blood.

  He stepped off the far side of the neutral ground and began working his way down the street, past automobiles whose windows had been broken and their stereos ripped from their dashboards. He waded up onto the lawn of the house the looters were ransacking and watched the flashlight beam go from room to upstairs room. Then the light shone down a staircase, its beam bouncing off the downstairs hallway as the person carrying the flashlight descended the stairs. Otis wrapped his left arm in the sling and steadied the rifle’s barrel against the trunk of a live oak, waiting for the front door to open.

  But the flashlight went out and the inside of the house fell into darkness. The front door did not open.

  Where was the boat?

  Otis stared into the shadows on both sides of the house and could see nothing of significance. Then, as heat lightning rippled across the clouds, he realized the flooding at the back of the house was even greater than in front. In fact, the alley and the garages along it were filled by a dark, swiftly running river that had created a navigable canal though the entirety of the neighborhood.

  Somebody hit the starter button on an outboard motor and Otis saw the bow of the aluminum boat plow down the alley, the dark shapes of four men slouched forward in the seats.

  He walked back home, his rifle slung on his shoulder. Tom Claggart and his friends were talking loudly in Claggart’s yard, lighting smokes, locking and loading, grinning at Otis. A couple of them wore olive-green T-shirts and camouflage pants with big pockets on them. “You save any for us?” one man asked.

  “They cut bait,” Otis replied.

  “Too bad,” the man said.

  “Yeah, too bad. There’s nothing like hanging black ivory on the wall,” Otis said.

  He had said it as bitterly and as ironically as possible. But to his listeners his remark was that of a kindred spirit. They roared at the inference. For Otis, that moment would remain like a dirty fingerprint on the mist, one that would come back to haunt him in ways he could not have imagined.

  Chapter 9

  EDDY AND BERTRAND Melancon were not given to complexities. They kept it simple. If a good situation put itself in your road, you made use of it. If it might jam you up, you put it in the ditch. Anything wrong with that?

  Eddy and Bertrand saw the storm as a gift from God. White people in New Orleans had been making money on the black man’s back for three hundred years. It was time for some payback. The uptown area of the city, from Lee Circle all the way up St. Charles Avenue to the Carrollton District, was like a tree full of ripe peaches waiting to be shook. The Melancon brothers had never been house creeps. They specialized in armed robbery and took down only high-value victims and thought breaking and entering was for chumps who deserved what they got when they walked into a blast from a twelve-gauge shotgun. But when tens of thousands of homes and stores were abandoned and without power, their security systems worthless, the cops either gone or pulling scores themselves, what was a guy supposed to do? Crowd into the stink at the Superdome or the Convention Center and try to find a place on the floor where somebody hadn’t already downloaded his bowels?

  The boat they had boosted in the Ninth Ward was perfect for the job. It had a wide beam, a shallow draft, cushioned seats, and a seventy-five-horse motor on it. As long as they concentrated on jewelry, coin collections, guns, and silverware, and avoided loading with heavy stuff like television sets and computers, they could possibly amass major five-figure money by dawn. They just had to keep it simple. The only dude between themselves and Central Lockup was that cracker Purcel, a bucket of whale sperm who did scut work for Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater, and they’d run over his fat ass with their ’sheen in the Quarter, left that motherfucker not knowing what hit him.

  Now they were going house-to-house on a flooded street where every live oak was broken in half on top of the yards, only one house with lights working in it, choppers flying overhead to the hospital roof, not a police boat in sight, Bertrand and Eddy both working the upstairs of a mansion that had beds in it with canopies over them, like the kind in Gone with the Wind, Eddy stuffing a woman’s fur coat into a drawstring laundry bag along with a handful of necklaces he found buried at the bottom of her panty drawer.

  Bertrand shined the light into the top of the closet. “Look what we got here, man,” he said.

  Eddy paused in his work and stared upward at the panel his brother was prying loose from the closet wall. Both brothers were thick-bodied men, the muscles in their shoulders swollen and hard as iron from shrug-lifting sixty-pound dumbbells in each hand. Both were stripped to the waist and sweating profusely in the superheated interior of the house, Bertrand with a red bandana knotted tightly around his head.

  Bertrand reached inside the wall and lifted out a short-barreled blue-black revolver with checkered walnut grips and a Ziploc bag fat with white granular crystals. “Oh mama, Whitey’s private stash and a thirty-eight snub. This is gonna be one pissed-off dude,” he said. “Wait a minute. That ain’t all.”

  Bertrand stuck the bag of cocaine down the front of his trousers and handed the revolver to his brother. He reached back inside the wall and lifted out five bundles of one-hundred-dollar bills, each of them wrapped with a wide rubber band. He whistled. “Do you believe this shit? This motherfucker’s in the life.”

  “Maybe this ain’t the place to take down,” Eddy said.

  “Hey, man, ain’t nobody know we here. This is our night. We ain’t blowing it.”

  “You’re right, man. The dagos ain’t running things no more, nohow. What you doing?”

  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.

  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 right 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.