The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  “Is my son coming?” she said.

  “Ma’am?” Clete said.

  “Are you he? Are you my son?”

  “I think he’ll be here any minute now,” Clete said, and moved quickly down the corridor, a lump in his throat.

  The intensive care area looked like a charnel house. Pockets of water had formed in the ceiling and were dripping like giant paint blisters on the patients, most of whom still wore their street clothes. The patients who had been brought up from the ER had been shot, stabbed, cut, beaten, electrocuted, hit by automobiles, and pulled half-dead from storm drains. Some had broken bones that were still unset. A woman with burns on eighty percent of her body was wrapped in a sheet that had become glued to her wounds. A man who had been struck by the propeller of an airboat made sounds that Clete had not heard since he lay in a battalion aid station in the Central Highlands. Almost all of the patients were thirsty. Most of them needed morphine. All of those who were immobile had to relieve themselves inside their clothes.

  Clete grabbed an intern by the arm. The intern had the wirelike physique of a long-distance runner, his eyes jittering, his pate glistening with moisture. “Get your hand off me,” he said.

  Clete raised his palms in the air. “I’m a licensed bail agent. I’m looking for a fugitive by the name of Eddy Melancon. An informant said his brother dropped him off at this hospital.”

  “Who cares?”

  “The victims of his crimes do.”

  The intern seemed to think it over. “Yeah, Melancon, I worked on him. Third bed over. I don’t think you’ll find him too talkative.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “If you want to call it that.”

  “Hey, Doc, I know y’all are having a rough go of it up here, but I’m not exactly having the best day of my life, either. How about getting the mashed potatoes out of your mouth?”

  “His spinal cord is cut. If he lives, he’ll be a sack of mush the rest of his life. You want to talk to his brother?”

  “He’s here?” Clete said, dumbfounded.

  “Five minutes ago he was.” The intern shined his flashlight down the corridor at a man sitting in an open window. “See? Enjoy.”

  Clete threaded his way between the gurneys and tapped Bertrand Melancon on the shoulder with his flashlight. “Hello, asshole. Remember me? The last time you saw me it was through the front windshield of your car,” he said.

  “I know who you are. You work for them Jews at the bail bonds office,” Bertrand said.

  “I also happen to be the guy you ran your car over.”

  “I don’t own a car. Say, you’re blocking my breeze, you mind?”

  Clete could feel his mouth drying out and tiny stitches beginning to pop loose inside his head. “How would you like to go the rest of the way out that window?”

  “Do what you gonna do, man.”

  For Clete, Bertrand Melancon seemed to personify what he hated most in the clientele he dealt with on a daily basis. They were raised by their grandmothers and didn’t have a clue who their fathers were. They got turned out in jail and thought of sexual roles in terms of prey or predator. They lied instinctively, even when there was no reason to. Trying to find a handle on them was impossible. They were inured to insult, indifferent to their own fate, and devoid of guilt or shame. What bothered Clete most about them was his belief that anyone from their background would probably turn out the same.

  “Turn around. We going to meet a black cop named Tee Boy Pellerin,” Clete said, pulling his cuffs loose from the back of his belt. “You’ll dig this guy. He grew up in the Lower Nine himself. He’s got a soft spot for gangbangers who strong-arm rob their own people and sell meth to their children. Just don’t step on his shoeshine. He hates guys who step on his shoeshine.”

  Clete crimped the cuffs tight on both of Bertrand’s wrists and spun him back around so he could look him squarely in the face. “Did I hear you laugh?”

  “I ain’t laughed, man.”

  “Yeah, you did. I heard you.”

  “Troot is, I don’t care what you do, fat man. You ought to take a bat’. Get this over. I’m tired of listening to you.”

  Clete wanted to hit him. No, he wanted to tear him apart, seam and joint. But what was the real source of his anger? The reality was he had no power over a man who had tried to do a hit-and-run on him. There was no place to take him. Clete had bummed a ride to the hospital on an airboat full of cops who had continued on down the avenue to the Carrollton District. Central Lockup was underwater, and he had no way to effectively transport Bertrand to the chain-link jail at the airport. With luck he could surrender custody of Bertrand to Tee Boy and collect a bail-skip fee from Nig and Willie, plus collect for finding Eddy Melancon among the living dead at the hospital, but chances were Bertrand would utilize the chaos of Katrina to slip through the system again.

  Also, Andre Rochon was still out there, and Clete had a special beef to settle with him.

  Clete worked Bertrand down a stairwell and shoved him outside.

  “I ain’t fighting wit’ you, man. Quit pushing me around,” Bertrand said.

  “Shut up,” Clete said, walking him toward Tee Boy, who was sitting on a low wall that separated the parking lot from the hospital. Tee Boy was eating a sandwich partially wrapped in aluminum foil.

  “What you got here?” he asked.

  “Bertrand Melancon, three bench warrants, strong-arm robbery, intimidating witnesses, and general shit-head behavior since he was first defecated into the world. I’m surrendering custody of Bertrand to you. I already warned him about what happens to people who step on your shoeshine.”

  “This ain’t funny, Purcel.”

  “You’re right, it isn’t. Bertrand and his brother Eddy ran me down with their car on Saturday evening. They did this while I was searching the panel truck of their fellow scum wad Andre Rochon. In the back of that panel truck I saw a stuffed animal and a coil of polyethylene rope. Just before shit-breath here ran me over, I remembered an article I saw in the newspaper about three black guys who abducted a fifteen-year-old girl. She was walking back from a street fair in the Lower Nine. She was carrying a stuffed bear. These guys dragged the girl into a panel truck and tied her up and raped her. You still live in the Lower Nine, don’t you, Tee Boy?”

  “Yeah,” Tee Boy replied, brushing crumbs off his face, his eyes settling on Bertrand.

  “You think this outstanding example of young manhood could be a possible suspect?” Clete asked.

  “What about it, boy?” Tee Boy said.

  “What about what?” Bertrand said.

  “Are you planning to step on my shoeshine?”

  “Are you crazy, man?”

  Tee Boy hit him hard in the face with the flat of his hand, the kind of blow that rattles eyeballs in their sockets. “I ax you a question. You gonna answer it?”

  “No, suh, I ain’t planning to step on your shoeshine.”

  “You kidnap and rape a girl in the Lower Nine?”

  “I brought my brother to the hospital ’cause somebody shot him t’rou the t’roat. A kid wit’ us was killed, too. I ain’t tried to run away. I come here for help. I missed my court appearance ’cause I was sick. That’s all you got on me. You quit hitting me.”

  “Turn around. Look out there at that boat tied to the car bumper,” Clete said. “See those bodies in there? Those bodies belong to dead people. You’re going to be cuffed to them. It’s a long way to the chain-link jail at the airport. If you were Tee Boy and you got stuck with four corpses and a dog turd like yourself and you had a chance to deep-six the whole collection at a convenient underwater location, what would you do?”

  But Clete realized he was firing blanks. Bertrand Melancon had seen a bullet turn his brother’s body into yesterday’s ice cream, and manufactured horror scenarios from a bail-skip chaser came in a poor second on the shock scale. Clete also realized that Tee Boy Pellerin was not listening to him, either, that his eyes were fastened on Bertrand and
that his face was breaking into a grin as he connected dots and information Clete had no knowledge of.

  “Want to let me in on it?” Clete said.

  “We had a ‘shots fired’ and a fatality about two or three hours ago. Four looters were working out of a boat back toward Claiborne. A kid took a big one through the head. Guess whose place they’d just hit?”

  “I don’t know,” Clete replied.

  “Guy owns a flower store. Also a bunch of escort services. His wife looks like the Bride of Frankenstein.” Tee Boy was starting to laugh now.

  “Sidney Kovick?” Clete said.

  “These pukes ripped off the most dangerous gangster in New Orleans and tore his house apart on top of it. One of our guys went inside and said it looked like somebody had drove a fire truck through the walls.” Tee Boy was choking on his sandwich bread now, laughing so hard that tears were rolling down his cheeks. “Hey, kid, if you stole anything from Sidney Kovick, mail it to him COD from Alaska, then buy a gun and shoot yourself. With luck, he won’t find your grave.”

  Tee Boy stood up and coughed into his palm until his knees were buckling.

  “Who’s this Kovick guy?” Bertrand said to Clete. “Y’all just jerking my stick, right?”

  Chapter 11

  AFTER SEVEN DAYS I was rotated back to New Iberia. I had almost forgotten Natalia Ramos, the companion of Father Jude LeBlanc. In fact, I had deliberately pushed her name out of my mind. I wanted no more of New Orleans and other people’s grief. I just wanted to be back on Bayou Teche with my family and Tripod, our raccoon, and our unneutered warrior cat, Snuggs. I wanted to wake in the morning to the smell of coffee and moldy pecan husks in the yard and camellia bushes dripping with dew and the fecund odor of fish spawning in the bayou. I wanted to wake to the great gold-green, sun-spangled promise of the South Louisiana in which I had grown up. I didn’t want to be part of the history taking place in our state.

  “Phone’s ringing, Dave,” Alafair said from the kitchen.

  “Would you answer it, please?”

  Through the doorway I could see her frying eggs and ham slices in a heavy iron skillet, lifting it by its handle without a hot pad, her back to me. It was hard to believe she was the same little El Salvadoran Indian girl I had pulled from a submerged plane out on the salt many years ago. She clanged the skillet on the stove and picked up the phone, resting her rump against the drain board, giving me a look.

  “Is Dave Robicheaux here? Wait a minute. I’ll check,” she said. She lowered the receiver, the mouthpiece uncovered. “Dave, are you here? If you are, a lady would like to speak to you.”

  That’s what you get when your kid goes to Reed College and joins kickboxing clubs.

  I took the receiver from her hand. “Hello?” I said.

  “This is Natalia Ramos, Mr. Robicheaux. I’m here at the shelter, the one you told me to go to. Have you found out where Jude went? I can’t get no information from anybody at the shelter. I thought maybe you had lists of people who was picked up by the Coast Guard.”

  “No, ma’am, I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Jude’s in pain all the time from his cancer. He went down to the Lower Nine to give his people communion. He’d always been scared to give people communion at Mass. ”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Ramos, but you’re not making sense.”

  “His hands tremble all the time. He thinks he’ll drop the chalice. He’d always let another priest give out Communion at Mass. But this time he was gonna say Mass and give people Communion.”

  In the background I could hear voices echoing in a large area, perhaps inside a gymnasium or a National Guard armory. Alafair was setting my breakfast on the kitchen table, placing the plate and knife and fork and coffee cup and saucer carefully on the surface so as not to make any noise. Her hair was long and black on her shoulders, her figure lovely inside her jeans and pink blouse.

  I didn’t know what to say to Natalia Ramos. “Where are you?” I asked.

  “At the high school in Franklin.”

  “I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”

  “Where’s Chula at?” she asked.

  “Your brother?”

  “Yeah, where’d you put him at?”

  “In the Iberia Parish Prison, along with his fall partner.”

  I thought her next statement would be an abrasive one. But I was wrong.

  “Maybe he can get some help there. Jail is the only place Chula ever did all right. I’ll be waiting for you, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  I placed the telephone receiver back in the cradle, already regretting that I had taken the call.

  “Who was that?” Alafair said.

  “A Central American prostitute and junkie who was shacked up with a Catholic priest.”

  I sat down and began eating. I could feel Alafair behind me, like a shadow breaking against the light. She rested her hand on my shoulder. “Dave, you have the best heart of any man I’ve ever known,” she said.

  I could feel the blood tingle in the back of my neck.

  THE HIGH SCHOOL gymnasium in Franklin, down the bayou in St. Mary Parish, was lined with row upon row of army-surplus cots. Children were running everywhere, inside and outside, sailing Frisbees that a local merchant had brought from his store. I found Natalia washing clothes by hand in the lee of the building, her arms deep inside an aluminum tub, the tails of her denim shirt tied under her breasts. I asked her to tell me again of her last moments with Jude LeBlanc.

  “He brought the boat to the church roof. He was up there chopping a hole with an ax to get everybody out. Then I heard a fight up there. I didn’t see him again.”

  It was warm in the shade, but her face looked cool and dry, her ribs etched against her dusky skin. She wore sandals and baggy men’s khakis and looked like a Third World countrywoman who was washing the clothes of children who were not her own. She did not look like a prostitute or a junkie.

  “Did you bring any dope into the shelter?” I said.

  “You drove here to ask me that?”

  “You were holding when you got busted. I got you off the wrist chain and sent you here. That makes you my responsibility. So that’s why I’m asking you if you brought any dope into the shelter.”

  “I been trying to get clean. There’s some people in the gym putting together a Narcotics Anonymous group. I’m gonna start going to meetings again.”

  She had managed to answer my question without answering my question. “Ms. Ramos, if I find out you are using or distributing narcotics in this shelter, I’m going to get you kicked out or put in jail.”

  She squeezed out a pair of children’s blue jeans and laid them on the side of the tub. “I got to go back to New Orleans.”

  “I think that’s a mistake.”

  “I keep seeing Jude drowning there in the dark, without no one to help him.”

  “Jude is a stand-up guy. My advice is that you don’t treat him as less.”

  “He used to say a special reconciliation Mass on Saturday afternoon for all the whores and junkies and street people. He gave everybody absolution, all at one time, no matter what they done. Somebody attacked him to get his boat. I think they killed him. I got to find out. I just can’t live without knowing what happened to him.”

  “Ms. Ramos, tens of thousands of people are missing right now. FEMA is trying to-”

  “How come nobody came?”

  “Pardon?”

  “People were drowning all over the neighborhood and nobody came. A big, fat black woman in a purple dress was standing on top of a car, waving at the sky. Her dress was floating out in the water. She was on the car a half hour, waving, while the water kept rising. I saw her fall off the car. It was over her head.”

  I didn’t want to hear more stories about Katrina. The images I had seen during the seven-day period immediately after the storm would never leave me. Nor could I afford the anger they engendered in me. Nor did I wish to deal with the latent racism in our culture that was already beginning to rear its hea
d. According to the Washington Post, a state legislator in Baton Rouge had just told a group of lobbyists in Baton Rouge, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

  How do you explain a statement like that to people who are victims of the worst natural disaster in American history? The answer is you don’t. And you don’t try to fix a broken world and you don’t try to put Band-Aids on broken people, I told myself.

  “I believe Jude would want you to remain at the shelter. You can do a lot of good here. I promise I’ll do my best to find out what happened to him,” I said.

  “I think he talked about you,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Jude said he used to deliver the newspaper to a policeman who owned a bait shop. He said the policeman was a drunk but he was a good man who tried to help people who didn’t have no power. Isn’t that you he was talking about?”

  She knew how to set the hook.

  AFTER LUNCH I drove to the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department and went upstairs to my office. The contrast between the normalcy of my job in Iberia Parish and the seven days I had just spent in New Orleans was like the difference between the bloom and confidence of youth and the mental condition of a man who has been stricken arbitrarily by a fatal illness. The building’s interior was spotless and full of sunshine. Cool air flowed steadily from the wall vents. One of the secretaries had placed flowers on the windowsills. A group of deputies in crisp uniforms and polished gunbelts were drinking coffee and eating doughnuts on the reception counter in front. From my second-story office window I could look out on a canopy of palm and live oak trees that cover a working-class neighborhood, and behind the cathedral I could see a cemetery of whitewashed brick crypts where Confederate dead remind us that Shiloh is not a historical abstraction.