The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  The Tin Roof Blowdown

  James Lee Burke

  Tight plotting, Solid Finish

  Because he’s a damn good writer James Lee Burke knows how to keep a plot going from start to finish with no loose ends or out-of-the-blue surprises that amateurishly attempt to explain and finish off a narrative. He easily weaves several ancillary situations into the story line of The Tin Roof Blowdown. These are of interest on their own, but more importantly they serve to expand and add often curious layers to the main show that centers around the eye of mayhem left behind by a pair of hurricanes.

  I bring this up since I just finished reading a book by Jeffrey Deaver titled The Cold Moon. The bad guy, a most interesting sociopath called The Watchmaker who is a brilliant killer with machinations of Machiavellian stature, is the author of a poem about a cold moon, so one would suppose that he would figure prominently in the denouement of the novel. He doesn’t. Not at all. He escapes from the cops and vanishes from the book with nearly one-hundred pages left, obviously setting a not-so-subtle stage for a return in another Deaver effort. This strikes me as venal artifice by a writer who certainly has reached a point of financial and critical security where such shenanigans are unnecessary and beneath him.

  None of this fakery for Burke. From the first book I read by him years ago, The Neon Rain to others that included Black Cherry Blues, The Lost Get-Back Boogie, Jolie Blon’s Bounce, and now this one, Burke has played it straight telling his stories and making sure loose ends are tied up when the last page is read. And like I said he can write.

  I said he smiled. That’s not quite right. Jude shined the world on and slipped its worst punches and in a fight knew how to swallow his blood and never let people know he was hurt. He had his Jewish mother’s narrow eyes and chestnut hair, and he combed it straight back in a hum, like a character in a 1930s movie. Somehow he reassured others that the earth was a good place, that the day was a fine one, and that good things were about to happen to all of us.

  Tight, succinct descriptions like the one above or similarly structured vignettes connect and in doing so glide the reader from scene to scene. None of this is as easy as Burke makes it look. That’s called skill. He’s got it in spades.

  But this is to be expected of a man who’s written more than twenty-five novels, a man who divides his time between seemingly disparate locations – Missoula, Montana and New Iberia, Louisiana. Living in these two places seems to give him an expanded and sympathetic view of the world and those of us who bump and grind our way through it making his characters and their short comings easily assimilated, allowing the reader to experience sympathy and often empathy.

  The setting of The Tin Roof Blowdown is largely post-apocalypse Louisiana following the devastation wrought by first Hurricane Katrina then Rita. The landscape has been reduced to a naturally nuked wasteland where murder, rape and theft are the order of the day perpetrated by both punks run amok and many cops. Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Detective Dave Robicheaux is deployed to New Orleans, the once grand city now reduced to a feudal state without electrical power, clean water, food or any sense of societal order. Bloated bodies – humans, cats, dogs – float in flooded streets or lie tangled in downed, shattered trees. In this chaos Robicheaux must locate two serial rapists, a morphine-addicted priest, and a vigilante who quite possibly is more dangerous than the thugs looting the city and shooting at rescue helicopters overhead. Based on past books, just another day at the office for Robicheaux. Burke’s got so much going on here that it would be easy for him to inadvertently confuse the reader, if not himself, beyond salvation allowing the book to devolve into a miasma of none-related tales – a rag-tag collection of short stories pretending to be a novel.

  Again his skill and also confidence as a writer never allows this to happen. Not even close. Each section and chapter advances the drama logically and without undo cliff hangings. A good example is when a killer stalking the detective’s daughter is spotted outside a cabin.

  Out among the willows, I saw the solitary fisherman lean down in his boat and pick up something from the bottom. He knocked his hat off his head to give himself better vision and raised the rifle to his shoulder. I could not make out the features of his face, but the moon had started to rise and I saw the light gleam on his bald head inside the shadows.

  I was already out the screen door and running down the slope when he let off the first round.

  So many mystery writers would then wander off for a chapter or several on another tangent leaving a person wondering what’s going on back at the bayou. Not Burke. He again displays his confidence by moving directly forward with the above scene in the next chapter. He knows that each element in his books can stand on its own and doesn’t need the tired device of leaving the reader up in the air for pages on end to maintain interest in the overall narrative arc.

  And Burke slips in sharp, humorous observations on the human condition throughout the book like this one following an argument between Robicheaux and his wife, a former nun.

  I just went outside and started the truck, my face hot, my ears ringing with the harshness of our exchange. The yard had fallen into shadow and cicadas were droning in the trees, like a bad headache that won’t go away. Just as I was backing into the street, regretting my words, trying to accept Molly’s anger and hurt feelings, she came out on the gallery and waved good-bye.

  That’s what happens when you marry nuns.

  For those who’ve not yet read Burke, The Tin Roof Blowdown is a great place to start. For those who are already fans of his, this mystery is merely one more top-notch effort by a most talented author.

  James Lee Burke

  The Tin Roof Blowdown

  Book 16 in the Robicheaux series

  Acknowledgments

  MY THANKS TO GLEN PITRE for his personal account about brown recluse spiders and for his account involving the desperation of the people trying to escape the storm on Highway 23.

  For John and Kathy Clark

  Before the mountains were settled,

  Before the hills, I was brought forth;

  While as yet He had not made the earth or the fields,

  Or the primal dust of the world.

  When He prepared the heavens, I was there,

  When He drew a circle on the face of the deep,

  When He established the clouds above,

  When He strengthened the fountains of the deep,

  When He assigned to the sea its limit,

  So that the waters would not transgress His command,

  When He marked out the foundations of the earth,

  Then I was beside Him as a master craftsman;

  And I was daily His delight,

  Rejoicing always before Him,

  Rejoicing in his inhabited world,

  And my delight was with the sons of men.

  (Proverbs 8:24-31)

  Chapter 1

  MY WORST DREAMS have always contained images of brown water and fields of elephant grass and the downdraft of helicopter blades. The dreams are in color but they contain no sound, not of drowned voices in the river or the explosions under the hooches in the village we burned or the thropping of the Jolly Green and the gunships coming low and flat across the canopy, like insects pasted against a molten sun.

  In the dream I lie on a poncho liner, dehydrated with blood expander, my upper thigh and side torn by wounds that could have been put there by wolves. I am convinced I will die unless I receive plasma back at battalion aid. Next to me lies a Negro corporal, wearing only his trousers and boots, his skin coal-black, his torso split open like a gaping red zipper from his armpit down to his groin, the damage to his body so grievous, traumatic, and terrible to see or touch he doesn’t understand
what has happened to him.

  “I got the spins, Loot. How I look?” he says.

  “We’ve got the million-dollar ticket, Doo-doo. We’re Freedom Bird bound,” I reply.

  His face is crisscrossed with sweat, his mouth as glossy and bright as freshly applied lipstick when he tries to smile.

  The Jolly Green loads up and lifts off, with Doo-doo and twelve other wounded on board. I stare upward at its strange rectangular shape, its blades whirling against a lavender sky, and secretly I resent the fact that I and others are left behind to wait on the slick and the chance that serious numbers of NVA are coming through the grass. Then I witness the most bizarre and cruel and seemingly unfair event of my entire life.

  As the Jolly Green climbs above the river and turns toward the China Sea, a solitary RPG streaks at a forty-five-degree angle from the canopy below and explodes inside the bay. The ship shudders once and cracks in half, its fuel tanks blooming into an enormous orange fireball. The wounded on board are coated with flame as they plummet downward toward the water.

  Their lives are taken incrementally-by flying shrapnel and bullets, by liquid flame on their skin, and by drowning in a river. In effect, they are forced to die three times. A medieval torturer could not have devised a more diabolic fate.

  When I wake from the dream, I have to sit for a long time on the side of the bed, my arms clenched across my chest, as though I’ve caught a chill or the malarial mosquito is once again having its way with my metabolism. I assure myself that the dream is only a dream, that if it were real I would have heard sounds and not simply seen images that are the stuff of history now and are not considered of interest by those who are determined to re-create them.

  I also tell myself that the past is a decaying memory and that I do not have to relive and empower it unless I choose to do so. As a recovering drunk, I know I cannot allow myself the luxury of resenting my government for lying to a whole generation of young men and women who believed they were serving a noble cause. Nor can I resent those who treated us as oddities if not pariahs when we returned home.

  When I go back to sleep, I once again tell myself I will never again have to witness the wide-scale suffering of innocent civilians, nor the betrayal and abandonment of our countrymen when they need us most.

  But that was before Katrina. That was before a storm with greater impact than the bomb blast that struck Hiroshima peeled the face off southern Louisiana. That was before one of the most beautiful cities in the Western Hemisphere was killed three times, and not just by the forces of nature.

  Chapter 2

  THE CENTERPIECE OF my story involves a likable man by the name of Jude LeBlanc. When I first knew him he was a nice-looking kid who threw the Daily Iberian, played baseball at Catholic High, and was a weekly communicant at the same church I attended. Although his mother was poorly educated and worked at menial jobs and his father a casualty of an oil-well blowout, he smiled all the time and was full of self-confidence and never seemed to let misfortune get him down.

  I said he smiled. That’s not quite right. Jude shined the world on and slipped its worst punches and in a fight knew how to swallow his blood and never let people know he was hurt. He had his Jewish mother’s narrow eyes and chestnut hair, and he combed it straight back in a hump, like a character out of a 1930s movie. Somehow he reassured others that the earth was a good place, that the day was a fine one, and that good things were about to happen to all of us. But as I watched Jude grow into manhood, I had to relearn the old lesson that often the best people in our midst are perhaps destined to become sojourners in the Garden of Gethsemane.

  Ordinary men and women keep track of time in sequential fashion, by use of clocks and calendars. The residents of Gethsemane do not. Here are a few of their stories, each of them touching, in an improbable way, the life of a New Iberia kid who grew into a good man and did nothing to invite the events fate would impose upon him.

  ON FRIDAY, August 26, 2005, Jude LeBlanc wakes in a second-story French Quarter apartment, one that allows him a view of both the courtyard below and the spires of St. Louis Cathedral. It’s raining hard now, and he watches the water sluicing down the drain-pipes into the beds of hibiscus, banana trees, and hydrangeas below, pooling in the sunken brickwork that is threaded with leaves of wild spearmint.

  For just a moment he almost forgets the ball of pain that lives twenty-four hours a day in the base of his spine. The Hispanic woman whose name is Natalia is fixing coffee and warm milk for him in the tiny kitchen off the living room. Her cotton sundress is dark purple and printed with bone-colored flowers that have pink stamens. She’s a thin woman whose strong hands and muscular tautness belie the life she leads. She glances at him over her shoulder, her face full of concern and pity for the man who roaches back his hair as Mickey Rooney did in old American movies she has rented from the video store.

  When she hooks, she works with a pimp who drives an independent cab. She and her pimp usually find johns in the early a.m. along Bourbon and take them either to a private parking lot behind a burned-out building off Tchoupitoulas or a desiccated frame house owned by the pimp’s brother-in-law on North Villere, thereby avoiding complications with their more organized competitors, most of whom enjoy established relationships with both cops and the vestiges of old Mob.

  Natalia brings him his coffee and warm milk and a single powdered beignet from the Café du Monde on a tray. She draws the blinds, turns the electric fan on him, and asks, “You want me to do it for you?”

  “No, I don’t need it right now. I’ll wait until later in the day.”

  “I don’t think you got no sleep last night.”

  He watches the rainwater feathering off the roof and makes no reply. When he sits up on the rollaway bed, tentacles of light wrap around his thighs and probe his groin. Natalia sits down beside him, her dress dropping into a loop between her knees. Her hair is black and thick and she washes it often so it always has a sheen in it, and when she takes it down on her shoulders she is truly lovely to look at. She doesn’t smoke or drink, and there’s never a hint of the life she leads in her clothes or on her skin, not unless you include the tracks inside her thighs.

  Her face is lost in thought, either about him or herself, he’s not sure. To her, Jude LeBlanc is a mystery, one she never quite understands, but it’s obvious she accepts and loves him for whatever he is or isn’t and imposes no judgment upon him.

  “Can I do something else for you?”

  “Like what?”

  “Sometimes I feel I don’t ever do you no good, that I can’t give you nothing,” she says.

  “You fixed breakfast for me,” he says.

  She changes her position and kneels behind him on the rollaway, rubbing his shoulders, clutching him briefly to her, resting her cheek against the back of his head. “They got drugs in Mexico the pharmaceutical companies don’t allow on the market here,” she says.

  “You’re my cure,” he replies.

  She holds him, and for just a moment he wants to release all the desperation and hopelessness and unrelieved sense of loss that have characterized his life. But how do you explain to others that a false Gleason score on a prostate biopsy can result in so much damage to a person’s life? Most people don’t even understand the terminology. Plus he does not wish to rob others of their faith in the exactitude of medical science. To do so is, in a way, the same as robbing them of the only belief system they have.

  The Gleason scale had indicated that the cancer had not spread outside the prostate. As a consequence the surgeon had elected not to take out the erectile nerve. The positive margins left behind went into the lymph nodes and the seminal vessels.

  Natalia flattens herself against him, pressing her loins tightly into his back, and he feels desires stirring in him that he tries not to recognize, perhaps secretly hoping they will preempt the problems of conscience that prevent him from ever escaping his own loneliness.

  He gets up from the rollaway, trying to hide his erecti
on as he puts on his trousers. His Roman collar has fallen off the nightstand and a tangle of animal hair and floor dirt has stuck to the bottom rim. He goes to the sink and tries to clean it, rubbing the smudge deeper into the collar’s whiteness, splashing it with grease from an unwashed pot. He leans heavily on his hands, his sense of futility more than he can hide.

  Outside, the velocity of the wind is fanning the rain off the roof in sheets. A flowerpot topples from the balcony and bursts on the bricks below. Across the courtyard, a neighbor’s ventilated wood shutters rattle like tack hammers on their hinges.

  “You going to the Ninth Ward today?” Natalia asks.

  “It’s the only place that will have me,” he replies.

  “Stay with me,” she says.

  “Are you afraid of the storm?” he asks.

  “I’m afraid for you. You need to be here, with me. You can’t be without your medicine.”

  She calls it his “medicine” to protect his feelings, even though she knows he’s been arrested twice with stolen prescription forms and once with morphine from an actual heist, that in reality he is no different from her or any other junkie in the Quarter. The irony is that a peasant woman from the Third World, one who works as a prostitute to fuel her own addiction, has a spiritual love and respect for him that few in his own society would be willing to grant.

  He feels a sudden tenderness for her that makes his loins turn to water. He puts his mouth on hers, then goes out into the rain, a newspaper over his head, and catches one of the few buses still running down to the lower end of the Ninth Ward.

  Chapter 3

  OTIS BAYLOR PROUDLY calls himself a North Alabama transplant who is at home anyplace in the world, New Orleans or New Iberia or wherever his insurance company cares to send him. He’s effusive in manner, generous in his giving, and devoted to his family. If at all possible, he refuses to judge others and to be marked by the prejudices of either his contemporaries or the people of his piney-woods birthplace, where as a boy he witnessed his father and uncle attend cross lightings in full Klan regalia.