In fact, Otis learned the insurance business from the bottom up, working a debit route in the Negro and blue-collar neighborhoods of Birmingham. Where other salesmen had failed, Otis was a shining success. At a convention of salespeople in Mobile, a cynical rival asked him his secret. “Treat folks with respect and you’ll be amazed at how they respond,” Otis answered.
Today he drives home early in rain and heavy traffic, telling himself that neither he nor his family will be undone by the forces of nature. His house was built in 1856 and was mute witness to Yankee occupation, epidemics of yellow jack, street battles between Union loyalists and White Leaguers, the lynching of Italian immigrants from streetlamps, and tidal surges that left the bodies of drowned clipper ship sailors hanging in trees. The men who built Otis’s house had built it right, and with the gasoline-powered generators he has placed in his carriage house, the flashlights and medical supplies and canned food and bottled water he has packed into his pantries and his attic, he is confident he and his family can persevere through the worst of natural calamities.
Have faith in God, but also have faith in yourself. That’s what Otis’s daddy always said.
But as he stares at the rain sweeping through the live oak trees in his yard, another kind of fear flickers inside him, one that to him is even more unsettling than the prospect of the hurricane that is churning toward the city, sucking the Gulf of Mexico into its maw.
Otis has always believed in the work ethic and taking care of one’s self and one’s own. In his view, there is no such thing as luck, either good or bad. He believes that victimhood has become a self-sustaining culture, one to which he will never subscribe. When people fall on bad times, it’s usually the result of their own actions, he tells himself. The serpent didn’t force Eve to pick forbidden fruit, nor did God make Cain slay his brother.
But if Otis’s view is correct, why did undeserved suffering come in such a brutal fashion to his homely, sad, overweight daughter, his only child, whose self-esteem was so low she was overjoyed to be invited to the senior prom by a rail of a boy with dandruff on his shoulders and glasses that made his eyes look like a goldfish’s?
After the prom, Thelma and her date had headed up Interstate 10 to a party, except the boy, who had moved to New Orleans only two months earlier, got lost and drove them into a neighborhood not far from the Desire Welfare Project. Mindlessly, the boy killed the engine and asked directions of a passerby. When he discovered his battery was dead and he couldn’t restart the engine, he walked to a pay phone to call Otis, leaving Thelma by herself.
The three black thugs who stumbled across her were probably ripped on weed and fortified wine. But that alone would not explain the ferocity of their attack on Otis’s daughter. They stuffed a red bandana in her mouth and twisted her arms behind her while they forced her between two buildings. Then they took turns raping and sodomizing her while they burned her skin with cigarettes.
Two years have passed since that night and Otis still seeks explanations. Thelma’s attackers were never caught, and Otis doubts they ever will be. Psychiatrists and therapists and the minister from Otis’s church have done little good in Thelma’s recovery, if “recovery” is the word. He wakes in the middle of the night and sits by himself in the den, determined that his wife will not discover the level of torment in his soul.
More important, perhaps, he refuses to be embittered or to join ranks with his neighbors who comprised part of the forty percent of the electorate that voted for the former Klansman and Nazi David Duke in a gubernatorial runoff.
He makes a cheese, lettuce, and mayonnaise sandwich, places it on a tray with a can of soda and a long-stemmed rose, and carries the tray up to Thelma’s room. She is bent over her desk, dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans with big brass brads on them, earphones clamped on her head. He has no idea what she is listening to. Sometimes she is enthralled by recordings of birdsong or waterfalls; other times she listens to heavy-metal bands that make Otis wish he had been born deaf.
“I thought you might want a snack,” he says.
Her mouth is painted with purple lipstick, her hair dark and freshly shampooed and clipped in bangs so that it looks like a helmet. Her face wears a perpetual pie-plate expression that makes others feel the problem in communicating with her is theirs, not hers. She vacillates between bouts of anorexia, binge eating, and bulimia. By normal standards, she would not be considered a likable person. But why should she be? Otis asks himself. How many young girls were psychologically prepared to deal with the damage these men had inflicted upon her?
She begins eating the sandwich without removing the earphones or speaking to him. He reaches down and lifts the foam-rubber pads from her head.
“Can’t you say hello to your old man?” he asks.
“Hi, Daddy,” she says.
“Want to help me latch the shutters when you’re finished?”
She looks up at him. An intense thought, like a dark bird with a hooked beak, seems to hide behind her eyes. “A civil defense guy said it’s going to be awful.”
“It could be. But we’re tough guys.”
He tries to read her expression. It’s not one of fear or apprehension. In fact, he wonders if it isn’t one of fulfilled expectation. She’s a reader of Nostradamus and is drawn to prophecies of destruction and death, as though she wishes to see the unhappiness in her own life transferred into the lives of others.
“The insurance companies are going to screw the city, aren’t they? Does your company write exceptions for water damage?” she says.
“That’s silly.”
“Not if you’re one of the people about to get screwed.”
He leaves the room and closes the door behind him, repressing the anger that blooms in his chest.
Downstairs his wife is dropping thirty-pound bags of crushed ice into the Deepfreeze. Her name is Melanie and she insists that he not call her “Mel,” even though that was the affectionate nickname he gave her when they first courted.
“Why are you doing that?” he asks.
“So we’ll have a way to preserve our food if we have a total outage,” she replies, a cloud of escaped cold air rising into her face.
He starts to explain that he’s already covered that possibility with his installation of gasoline-operated generators, that in effect she’s displacing the room in the freezer that should be used for all the perishables they can pack into it.
But he doesn’t argue. He was a widower when he met her five years ago on a beach in the Bahamas. She was a divorcée, deeply tanned and gold-haired and beautiful, much younger than he, a strong woman physically, bold in her look, her brown eyes wide-set and unblinking, her laughter suggesting disregard for convention and perhaps a degree of sexual adventurism. She was the kind of woman who could be a friend as well as a lover.
Otis was fifty-three at the time, prematurely bald but proud of the power in his hands and shoulders and not ashamed of his libido or the profuse way he sweated when he worked or the scent of testosterone his clothes sometimes carried. He was what he was and didn’t pretend otherwise. Obviously Melanie, or “Mel,” did not find him an unattractive man.
They were opposites in many ways, but each seemed to possess a set of qualities that compensated for a deficiency in the other, she with her urban sophistication and degree in finance from the University of Chicago, he with his work ethic and his common sense in dealing with people.
They said good-bye in the Bahamas without consummating their brief courtship but continued to talk long-distance to each other and exchange presents and e-mails. Two months passed, and on a summer night when the light was high in the sky and he could no longer stand his loneliness, Otis asked Melanie to meet him at the Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta. He was surprised at her aggressiveness in bed and the fact she came three times their first night together, something no other woman had ever done for him. He proposed one week later.
His friends thought he was impetuous and that perhaps he was being tak
en advantage of by a woman twenty years his junior. But what did he have to lose? he told them. His daughter needed a mother; Otis needed a wife; and let’s face it, he said, women with Melanie’s looks didn’t come his way every day.
After the first year he began to realize he had married a complex if not mercurial woman. Her attitudes were often inflexible, although the issue involved was usually insignificant. She canceled the cable service because the technician tracked mud into the foyer. She accused Otis of overtipping waiters and allowing the gardeners to get by with sloppy work. She seemed to carry a reservoir of anger with her as she would a social bludgeon, and selectively utilized it to cause embarrassment in public places and ultimately get her way.
An acquaintance in Chicago has told him that Melanie’s former husband was an alcoholic. The friend’s offer of information about Melanie’s past has only made Otis more confused. Melanie is rigidly abstemious, and Otis does not understand how her former husband’s behavior could account for her unpredictable mood swings today.
But the transformation in Melanie that was most difficult for Otis to accept took place after the attack upon Thelma. Each evening she began to show fatigue and complained of nausea and insisted on talking about nonexistent problems with their finances. He could feel her back constrict when he touched her in bed. On Saturday and Sunday mornings she awoke an hour earlier than he and went downstairs and into her day’s schedule, effectively neutralizing any romantic overture on his part.
On one occasion, unbeknown to her, he glimpsed her picking his clothes off the back of a chair, smelling them, then flinging them with disgust into a dirty clothes hamper.
Now, as the worst storm in Louisiana ’s history approaches the city, he wonders if she blames him for the assault upon his daughter. Is that the reason behind her irritability and her implicit criticism of whatever he does? Does she no longer think of him as protector of his family?
“I’m going to the club for a workout. Want to come?” he says.
“Now? Are you serious?”
“My daddy used to always say, ‘Respect Mother Nature, but nail down the shutters and don’t let her scare you.’”
She can hardly hide her ennui at his mention of his sawmill-employee father who went to the ninth grade. “Take Thelma with you,” she says.
“She doesn’t like the club.”
Melanie makes no reply and begins pulling dishes from the dishwasher and putting them away loudly in the cabinets.
“What is it? Why do I make you angry?” he says.
She seems to teeter on a direct answer to his question, her eyes charged with light. Then the moment passes. “I’m not angry. I just don’t think it’s good for Thelma to stay in her room all the time. Maybe she should think about getting a job,” she says.
But secretly Otis has always suspected that his wife is like many Northerners. She likes people of color collectively and as an abstraction. But she doesn’t feel comfortable with them individually. It’s been obvious from the night of the attack that she doesn’t want her friends to know her stepdaughter has been the victim of black rapists.
“You think I let Thelma down somehow?” he asks.
She examines her hands over the sink, feeling the bones in them, the joints of her fingers. She has begun to complain of arthritis, although she has not seen a doctor for at least a year. She looks at the rain beating on the philodendron and the banana trees and windmill palms in the side yard.
“Why did you let her go to the prom with an idiot who doesn’t know how to wash the dandruff out of his hair, much less protect his date from a bunch of animals?” she says.
“You never made any mistakes when you were that age?” he replies.
“Of that magnitude? No, I had to wait until I was a mature woman to do that,” she says.
He slings his workout bag over his shoulder and goes down the covered walk to the carriage house and backs his car under the canopy of oaks and into the street, knocking the trash can into the hedge. Melanie’s last statement to him is one he knows he will never be able to scrub out of his memory, no matter what form of amends or atonement, if any, she ever tries to make.
That thought is like a cold vapor wrapped around his heart, and briefly the avenue and windswept neutral ground and the scrolled purple and pink neon tubing on the corner drugstore go out of focus.
THE HEALTH CLUB is almost empty, the basketball court echoing with the sounds of a solitary shooter bouncing shots off a steel rim. The shooter is Otis’s neighbor, Tom Claggart, an export-import man who flies in a private plane with business friends to western game farms, where they shoot animals that are released from either cages or penned areas shortly before the hunters’ arrival. Tom has told Otis, with a lascivious wink, that he and his friends also land at a private airstrip not far from a brothel outside Vegas.
“Got her battened down?” he says, the basketball grasped between his palms.
“Pretty much,” Otis says.
Tom’s torso is as solid as a cypress stump, his head bullet-shaped. Each week a barber clips his mustache, which is threaded with white, and lathers his scalp and shaves it with a straight-edged razor.
“I think after landfall we’re gonna have monkey shit flying through the fan,” Tom says.
“I don’t know as I follow you,” Otis replies.
“The black Irish get restive after natural disasters.” Tom is smiling now, as though the two of them share a private knowledge.
“I guess we’ll find out,” Otis replies.
Tom flings his basketball down the court and watches it bounce and roll across the maple boards into the shadows. The windows high up on the walls are streaked with rain, whipped by the branches of trees. His face becomes thoughtful. “I’ve never talked to you about this before, but my sister-in-law told me what happened to your daughter. They ever catch those guys?”
“Not yet.”
“That’s a shame. If they didn’t catch them by now, they probably won’t.”
“I couldn’t say,” Otis replies.
“You own a gun?”
“Why?”
“Come Monday, those bastards are gonna be swarming all over the neighborhood. If I were you, I’d stop jerking on my dork and smell the coffee.”
“What makes you think you can talk to me like that?”
“Just speaking to you as a neighbor and a friend.”
“Don’t.”
“This isn’t like you, Otis.”
That’s what you think, you idiot, Otis says to himself, and is surprised by the virulence of his own thoughts.
Chapter 4
IT’S SATURDAY EVENING and long lines of automobiles are streaming out of New Orleans, northbound on Interstate 10, although rumors have already spread that there is not a motel room available all the way to St. Louis, Missouri.
But for the glad of heart, life goes on full-throttle in the French Quarter. In a corner bar off Ursulines, one in which Christmas lights never come down, Clete Purcel has positioned himself at a window so he can watch a shuttered cottage across the street, in front of which a black male is smoking a cigarette in an illegally parked panel truck. The rain has stopped and the air is unnaturally green and contains the dense, heavy odor of the Gulf. There is even a rip of bone-white light in the clouds, as though the evening sunset is about to resume. The black male in the panel truck is talking on a cell phone and blowing his cigarette smoke out the window, where it seems to hang in the air like damp cotton. Then he twists his head and stares at the bar, and for a moment Clete thinks he has been made.
But the black man is watching a woman in spiked heels and skintight shorts walking rapidly down the sidewalk, her sequined, fringed purse swinging back on her rump. The owner of the bar is opening all the doors, filling the interior with a bloom of fresh air that smells of brine and wet trees. The revelers inside react as though a bad moment in their lives has come and gone.
“You want another drink? It’s on the house,” the owner says.
“I look like I can’t pay for my drinks?” Clete says.
“No, you look like you got the heebie-jeebies. Maybe you ought to get yourself laid.”
Clete gives the owner a look, one that makes the owner’s eyes shift off Clete’s face. The owner is Jimmy Flannigan, an ex-professional wrestler who now wears earrings and has a full-body wax done at a parlor on Airline Highway.
“So don’t get laid. But you’re making my customers nervous. No one likes to get stepped on by out-of-control circus elephants.”
Clete has long ago given up contending with Jimmy’s insults. “I got news for you. The Apocalypse could blow through this dump and your clientele wouldn’t notice,” he says.
Jimmy pours into Clete’s glass from a Scotch bottle with a chrome nipple on it. The Scotch swirls inside the milk like marbled ice cream. “What’s eatin’ you, Purcel? Just off your feed?” he says.
Clete drinks his glass half empty. “Something like that,” he says.
How can he explain to Jimmy Flannigan the sense of apprehension and the déjà vu that dries out his mouth and causes his scalp to tighten against his skull? Or describe helicopters lifting off a rooftop into a sky ribbed with strips of blood-red cloud while Mobs of terrified Vietnamese civilians fight with one another and plead with United States Marines to let them on board? You learn it soon or you learn it late: There are some kinds of experience you never share with anyone, not even with people who have had their ticket punched by the same conductor you have.
Clete returns to the window and tries to concentrate on the black man parked across the street. The black man is Andre Rochon, a twenty-three-year-old bail skip whose forfeited bond is less consequential than the information he can provide on two other bail skips who are into Clete’s employers, Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine, for thirty large.
The Tin Roof Blowdown Page 2