The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  I went straight into the cove, sliding across the tops of downed trees, clanging against the hollow trunk of a tupelo gum. Up ahead, on the far side of the cypress, I could see the grassy slope of the levee and, on top, the square outline of a Humvee silhouetted against the sky.

  The man in the boat was in trouble. He couldn’t get through the trash in the water to the levee bank and I was now no more than twenty yards from him. Inside the gloom, I saw him pick up his rifle, catch hold of a tree limb, and jump over the side into the water, hoping to find a solid bottom.

  Instead, he went chest-high into the water, his shoes sinking into silt and layers of rotted vegetation. He slogged through the flooded trees toward the bank, the back of his shaved head white in the moonglow. At the edge of the water was a half-sunken commercial boat of some kind, with a home-carpentered plywood cabin aft, the entire hull soft with decay and scrolled with the scales of morning glory vines, the flooded hold a home for gars and alligators.

  If he thought his luck could not get worse, he was wrong. The Humvee on the levee came to life and drove away, leaving the shooter to his fate. He struggled through the water, trying to knock down tree branches with one hand and keep his rifle dry and in the air with the other. Then he went behind a tree trunk and I lost sight of him.

  I cut my engine and climbed out of my boat onto a cypress knee, then lowered myself into the water. I pushed the boat away from me, across a clearing, and watched it slide through the film of algae on the water, then clank against a tree.

  A solitary shot came from behind the pilothouse of the sunken boat.

  I leveled my.45 across a tree branch with two hands and sighted on the pilothouse. I cannot say why the shooter took cover there. The wood was as soft as decayed cork, the protective properties of the structure an illusion. But I suspected the shooter did not have a lot of choices at this point in his life and looked upon a man-made construction as the natural place to seek refuge in an alluvial piece of geography where he never thought he would find himself trapped and alone.

  I pulled the trigger. Flame flew into the darkness and the recoil brought my wrists up into the air. The second time I fired I heard him cry out. I had six rounds left in the.45. I fired a third round and saw wood explode out of the back of the pilothouse.

  He started wading up the mudflat onto the levee, limping, the rifle still in his hand. I lowered the sight on the small of his back and pulled the trigger again, except this time I didn’t stop firing until the magazine was empty and my ears were deaf from the explosions.

  I waded through a deep spot in the cove, then felt my shoes touch a hard bottom. I fitted my hand on the back of the half-sunken boat and pulled myself up on the levee, still shaking from the pursuit and the exchange of gunfire. The shooter lay facedown in the grass, his arms spread out by his sides, like a man who had fallen from a high altitude and pancaked into the earth. I lay the.45 in the grass and turned him over on his back. The exit wounds in his chest were the size of quarters, the cloth around them torn outward.

  At first I did not recognize the shooter because of the shaved head and the sutured injuries in his scalp and the look of astonishment that had frozen on his face.

  Then I realized that Ronald Bledsoe had not only tried to kill my family but had also screwed his partner. I guess I should have felt pity for the man I had just killed, but I didn’t. I also suspected he had invested most of his adult life in doing evil to others. In fact, I suspected he was one of those whose past consists of deeds we never want to learn about.

  Looks like you got a shitty deal, Bobby Mack, I thought to myself. But who knows? Maybe not all is lost. Maybe they play Texas Hold ’Em down in Hell.

  OTIS BAYLOR did not consider himself proficient in many skills, but there was one element in his life he was certain about: He was a natural-born insurance man. He knew how to provide it from the cradle to the grave. He knew people and what they needed and how to talk to them. And he also knew how to find them and to find out anything about them, particularly when they filed claims.

  In his visit to the Loreauville Quarters, it had not taken him long to discover through the neighbors that Bertrand Melancon had an auntie in the Ninth Ward. It took him even less time to find her name in a database shared by his former employer. She had filed a claim for damage done to her house by the floodwaters from Lake Pontchartrain, little knowing that in all probability the mention of floodwater virtually guaranteed she would receive nothing.

  But Otis Baylor was not worrying about the misfortune of Bertrand Melancon’s family members. Melancon had been to his house. The car tag left behind on the road was incontestable evidence he had been there. The purpose of his visit had remained unknown, but the fact he had been there was, in Otis’s mind, justification for whatever Otis did next.

  Then, while eating Saturday night supper with his family, a detective had knocked on his door and given him information that changed his entire perspective about his relationship to his wife, who had deceived him, and a rapist who had robbed his daughter of her soul.

  He did not sleep Saturday night and he spent much of Sunday sorting out his bills, paying them selectively, so that his utility services were not turned off and he did not default on the mortgage for his house in New Orleans. By midafternoon he knew he would get no rest until he went to the source of all his grief.

  He called a friend who worked as an adjuster for the company that carried the policy on the house in the Ninth Ward owned by Bertrand Melancon’s aunt.

  “Her name is Clemmie Melancon,” Otis said. “I suspect she’s long gone, but since she filed a claim, I figured you might have a mailing address or contact phone number for her.”

  “She evacuated to the Superdome, but she’s back home now,” the adjuster said.

  “In the Ninth Ward?”

  “She’s not in the worst part of it, but, yeah, she’s back home. She’s got Parkinson’s. I think all those people down there are going to get bulldozed eventually.”

  “How’s her claim looking?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Thanks for your help,” Otis said, and started to hang up.

  “It’s true, you been teaching the claimants how to slide one by us?” the friend said.

  “‘Slide’ is the wrong word. Think more in terms of ‘wrecking ball,’” Otis said, this time hanging up.

  It was 3:46 p.m. Outside, the sky was gray, the wind blowing, wet leaves plastering against the windows of his home office. Otis took his car keys from his pants pocket and spun them on his finger.

  “Where you going, Daddy?” Thelma asked.

  She stood in the doorway, one hip against the jamb, her expression inquisitive and innocent, the way it used to be before she and her date had gotten lost in a neighborhood that in minutes swallowed her alive.

  “My father and my uncle were members of the Ku Klux Klan,” he said. “They joined a hateful organization because they had been taught by others to resent themselves. My father was a good man, but he never understood who his real enemy was. It wasn’t people of color. It was the dragon that lived inside him. You think maybe it’s time you and I go look at the dragons?”

  THE RAIN HAD STOPPED and the night sky had cleared when Otis Baylor and his daughter entered the Ninth Ward of Orleans Parish. The topography, the windowless houses, the layers of building debris and garbage and dried flotsam did not look real but instead resembled a movie set or perhaps scenes spliced together from World War II black-and-white footage of a bombed-out city, leached of color, the only light provided by cook fires wavering under sheets of corrugated tin the remaining residents had propped across cinder blocks or stacks of bricks.

  Thelma had been silent for the last hour, and Otis wondered if he had asked too much of her, if indeed he had not made a choice for her that wasn’t his to make. He steered around a section of the street that had caved into a canal.

  “Daddy?” Thelma said.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “If
he’s there, what are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m not even sure I trust myself about that.”

  “Will you hurt him?”

  “I can’t say. But I might. I think I might like to do that. Until Mr. Robicheaux came to our house, I thought maybe I was going to kill him.”

  “You make me sad when you talk like that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not who you are.”

  Otis didn’t reply and kept his thoughts to himself, lest his daughter see a side to his personality that even he feared.

  He was amazed at how easy it was to find the house owned by Bertrand Melancon’s aunt. Someone had propped up the mailbox in the front yard and raked the mud off the numbers, even though there would probably be no postal delivery in the Ninth Ward for months, if ever. The yard was stacked with virtually everything the house had once contained: cloth-covered chairs and a sofa, a refrigerator, mattresses, bedsprings, a television set, clothes, food, a chest of drawers with flower decals pasted all over it, stripped wallpaper and carpeting, all of it caked with a greenish-black sludge that had dried like plastic. The windows of the house were tacked over with plywood, a screen in place on the entrance. In the driveway, on the side of the house, a young black man and an older black woman in a dress that hung on her like a sack were sitting on hard chairs by a fire burning in a ventilated oil drum.

  Neither one of them looked up when Otis approached them. Six slices of white bread, with pieces of cheese on them, were browning on a refrigerator grill above the fire.

  “You know who I am?” Otis asked.

  Bertrand raised his eyes and lowered them again. Then he looked at the car parked on the street and the young woman in the passenger seat. “Yes, suh, I ain’t got no doubt who you are.”

  “Who are you, ma’am?” Otis asked the woman.

  “Who are you, standing in my drive, axing questions?” she said. Her skin was as wrinkled as old putty, her breasts nothing more than dried dugs. Her movement was erratic, as though her motor control would not coordinate with itself. One of her eyelids drooped. Her hair was so thin it looked like duck down on her scalp.

  “My name is Otis Baylor. The young woman in the car is my daughter. Her name is Thelma. I suspect you’re Miss Clemmie, Bertrand’s auntie.”

  The woman watched the cheese melt on the bread slices. She picked up a tin can from her lap, bent over, and spit snuff in it.

  “Did Bertrand tell you what happened to my daughter, Miss Clemmie?”

  “She ain’t part of this, suh,” Bertrand said.

  “You’re staying at her house. She’s giving your refuge. That makes her part of it. Where’s your grandmother?”

  “Inside, resting. It’s cool tonight. She t’ought she’d rest.”

  “Mr. Robicheaux says you came to my house and tried to make amends. How does a man like you make amends for what he did, Mr. Melancon?”

  “I wanted to give y’all some diamonds I taken from a man who taken them from somebody else.”

  “That’s an insult.”

  “Suh, I ain’t mean to hurt y’all no more. I t’ought I was-” He stopped and widened his eyes, as though smoke were in them. “I ain’t gonna say no more. Call the cops or do what you come here to do.”

  Otis wore a short-sleeved shirt that suddenly seemed too small for his chest and throat, so small and tight he couldn’t breathe. “You wait here,” he said.

  He went inside the house without knocking. It was dark inside and he could hear the hum of mosquitoes in the rooms. The floor and walls seemed to be covered with the same greenish-black sludge or mold that he had seen on the debris piled in the yard. A woman lay on a cot in the hallway, breathing audibly, a pillow stuffed behind her head. “That you, Bertrand?” she said.

  “No, my name is Otis Baylor.”

  There were bandages wrapped around the palms of both the woman’s hands. “Where’s Bertrand at?” she said.

  “Outside, in the driveway,” Otis said.

  “You one of the men shot into my li’l house?”

  “No.”

  “You a policeman?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Then what you doing here?”

  “I’m an insurance man.”

  “You come here about Clemmie’s claim?”

  “No, I didn’t,” he said.

  “Would you help me up?”

  Otis reached down to take her by the arm. Then he heard the screen door behind him. “That’s all right, suh. I got it,” Bertrand said. He held a small white bowl in one hand. “She burned herself on the grill. I got to help her with her soup.”

  “These women shouldn’t be here,” Otis said.

  “Ain’t no place to take them,” Bertrand said.

  Otis watched while Bertrand hand-fed his grandmother. Otis wiped the mosquitoes out of his face. When the wind changed and blew through the back door, the odor of feces struck his nostrils. “I want to talk to you,” he said.

  “I got to finish here,” Bertrand said.

  “No, you come outside and talk to me now.”

  Bertrand set the bowl down on the floor, next to the cot, and followed Otis outside.

  “I feel like tearing you apart,” Otis said.

  “I guess you do.”

  “You go over to that car and you apologize.”

  “Suh?”

  “You heard me. You look my daughter in the face and you apologize, you sonofabitch, before I do something awful.”

  Bertrand walked to Otis’s car and stood in front of the passenger door, his back to Otis, blocking Otis’s view of his daughter’s face. While he spoke, Bertrand’s arms were folded on his chest, his head turned to one side. In silhouette, his body looked like it had no arms, like a wood post painted on the air. On the far side of the street, a dog was trying to dig something loose from a pile of smoldering garbage.

  Bertrand turned away from the car and walked past Otis toward the front door of the house. He was wiping his nose with the back of his wrist.

  “You come here,” Otis said.

  “What for?”

  “Did you hear me?” Otis said. He fitted his hand under Bertrand’s arm, almost lifting him into the air.

  “What you want from me? I done all I could do,” Bertrand said. “If them men who killed Andre and tortured Eddy get their hands on my auntie and grandmother, what you think is gonna happen to them? You tell me that, Mr. Baylor.”

  The question Bertrand had asked was legitimate: What did Otis want? To somehow give new life to the spiritual cancer that had fed at his father’s heart? To use his daughter’s suffering to justify beating a man bloody with his fists?

  “Daddy?” he heard Thelma say behind him.

  He turned and stared into her face.

  “Daddy, it’s all right. Let him go,” she said.

  “Honey-” he began.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

  She took his big hand in both of hers and smiled at him. “Come on, Daddy, we’re finished here,” she said.

  Bertrand Melancon remained stationary in the yard as they drove away. He was not sure what had happened between Otis Baylor and his daughter or what he should do next. In fact, he was not sure about anything. He wondered if his grandmother’s soup had grown cold. He wondered if his auntie and grandmother had any idea of the crimes he had committed. He wondered if his mother was still alive someplace and if she ever thought about him or Eddy. He wondered why every event that had transpired in his life was not what he had planned.

  How could that be? he asked himself. For just a moment, he wondered if the priest he had killed could give him an answer. That thought set his stomach on fire and caused him to spit blood in his auntie’s yard.

  Chapter 29

  THE PROBLEM WITH an adrenaline high, unlike one driven by booze, is that you cannot sustain it. When the heart-thundering rush subsides, when the clean smell of ignited cordite is blown away by the wind, you
find yourself in the same kind of dead zone that a drunkard lives in. You wake in the morning to white noise that is like a television set turned up full volume on an empty screen. The streets seem empty, the sky brittle, the air stained with industrial odors you do not associate with morning. The sun is white overhead, the way a flashbulb is white, and the trees offer neither birdsong nor shade. Whatever you touch has a sharp edge to it, and ineptitude and remorse seem to wrap themselves around all your thoughts. The world has become an unforgiving prison where the images from a mistaken moment have not disappeared with sleep and instead pursue you wherever you go. You spend your time rationalizing and justifying and eventually you take on the persona of someone you don’t recognize. It’s like stepping around a corner onto a street on which there are no other people. It’s not an experience you come back from easily.

  Monday morning Helen came into my office and sat down across from me. “You feeling okay, bwana?”

  “Right as rain,” I replied.

  I could hear her chewing gum, her jaws working steadily.

  “Why do you figure Bobby Mack Rydel came after you?”

  “Bledsoe was behind it. He played Rydel just like he plays everybody.”

  “You’re sure you didn’t see Bledsoe in the Humvee up on the levee?”

  I knew what she wanted me to say.

  “I didn’t see the guy in the Humvee,” I said.

  “Too bad. Look, you’re supposed to be on the desk till IA clears the shoot, but we should have that out of the way by close of business. We need Bledsoe in a cage. I’m with you on this one, Streak. I don’t care how we do it. This creep has spit on us again and again and gotten away with it. Let’s run at it from a different angle.”

  “How?”

  “Who was it who said, ‘When people say this is not about money, it’s about money’?”

  “H. L. Mencken.”

  “This is about those blood stones or whatever. Put all the scorpions in a matchbox and shake it up.”

  “With Bledsoe it’s personal. He enjoys it. If someone didn’t pay him to hurt other people, he’d pay to do it.”