The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  She was off balance when she stood up. I steadied her with one hand and walked her toward a first-aid station. “What happened to your feet?” I said.

  “I lost my shoes two days ago. We were on a roof that didn’t have no shingles. The nails were sticking out of the boards.”

  “Where’s Jude, Natalia?”

  “How you know my name?”

  “Your brother is Chula Ramos. He’s a member of MS-13. He told me about you and Jude.”

  She twisted out of my hand and faced me. Her sundress was glued against her skin, her forehead bitten by insects. A helicopter mounted with a searchlight swooped by overhead, chasing looters in the business district.

  “Where’s my brother? You using him to get to Jude?” she said.

  “You want to lose the attitude or go back on the chain?”

  Her eyes roved over my face, one tooth biting on the corner of her lip. “He was trying to get people at Mary Magdalene to evacuate. But a lot of them didn’t have no cars. So we all went up to the church because it’s got a big attic. Jude saw a boat floating by, one with a motor on it. He swam after it, in the dark. That was two nights ago.”

  I saw Helen waving at me. A fight had broken out on one of the buses and through the windows I could see men in silhouette flailing at one another.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “I saw him start up the boat and drive it back toward the church. I shined a flashlight on him so he could see better. It was a green boat, with a duck painted on the side, and I could see him sitting in the back, driving it straight for the church. He was gonna take everybody out of the attic. He’d got an ax from somebody and was gonna chop a hole in the roof, because the window wasn’t big enough for a lot of the people to go through.

  “I could hear him chopping up on the roof. The water was rising and I didn’t know if he could cut through the boards quick enough. Then the chopping stopped and I heard lots of feet scuffling and somebody cry out. I think maybe it was Jude.”

  The incessant blast of airboats, the idling diesel engines of buses and trucks, the thropping of helicopter blades were like a dental drill whirring into an exposed nerve. Helen clicked a flashlight on and off in my direction to get my attention, her tolerance waning.

  “I have to go now,” I said. “After you get your feet treated, I want you to get on that truck over there. In a couple of hours it’s going to a shelter in St. Mary Parish. I’m writing my cell phone number on my business card. I want you to call me when you get to the shelter.”

  “The ones who couldn’t get out the window drowned,” she said.

  “Say again?”

  “Almost all the people in the attic drowned. I dropped the children out the window, but I didn’t see them again in the water. Most of the others was too old or too big. I left them behind. I just left them behind and swam toward a big tree that was floating past. I could hear them yelling in the dark.”

  I started to speak, to offer some kind of reassurance to her, but there are times when words are of no value. I walked away and rejoined Helen and the other members of my department, all of whom were dealing with problems that were both tangible and transitory.

  When I looked for Clete Purcel, I could not see him in the crowd.

  Chapter 8

  OTIS BAYLOR WAS proud of the way his home had withstood the storm. Built of oak and cypress, with twin brick chimneys, by a clipper-ship captain who would later fight at the side of the Confederate admiral Raphael Semmes, the house lost no glass behind its latched shutters and developed no leaks in the ceilings, even though oak limbs weighing hundreds of pounds had crashed down on the roof. Otis’s neighbors were without power or telephone communication as the hurricane’s center plowed northward into Mississippi, but Otis’s generators worked beautifully and lit up his home with the soft pink-white radiance of a birthday cake.

  By midday Tuesday he was clearing his drive of broken tree limbs, lopping them into segments with his chain saw, preparing to get his car out of the carriage house and make contact with his company’s state headquarters in North Louisiana. His street was still flooded, the water way up in his and his neighbors’ yards, but Otis was convinced the city’s storm-pump system would eventually kick in and drain all of uptown New Orleans. Why wouldn’t it? The city had gone under in ’65 and had come back better than ever. You just had to keep the right perspective.

  But as the piles of sawed limbs grew higher and higher in his backyard, he realized it would take a cherry picker to clear the biggest pieces of debris from his drive and he also realized that probably eighty percent of his neighbors had evacuated, leaving their homes to whoever wished to enter them. He didn’t condemn them, but he couldn’t understand a man who would give up his home either to the forces of nature or to lawless men.

  The sky turned purple at sunset and hundreds of birds descended into his backyard, feeding on the worms that had been flooded to the surface. Otis went into the kitchen and poured a glass of whiskey, put a teaspoon of honey in it, and sipped it slowly while he stared out the back window at the gold strips of sunlight that clung with a kind of fatal beauty to the ruined branches of his trees.

  “The toilet won’t flush,” Thelma, his daughter, said.

  “Did you fill the tank from the bathtub?” he asked.

  “It won’t flush because everything is backing up. It’s disgusting,” Thelma said.

  “The sewer system will be back online in no time. You’ll see.”

  “Why didn’t we leave like everybody else? It was stupid to stay here.”

  “This is one time I agree with her,” Melanie, his wife, said from the kitchen doorway. She was smoking a cigarette, her shoulder propped against the doorjamb, every gold hair on her head neatly in place.

  “I’ve fixed a cold supper for us-chicken sandwiches and cucumber salad, with ice cream for dessert,” Otis said. “I think we have a lot to be thankful for.”

  “Like our visitors out there,” Melanie said. She nodded toward the front of the house, blowing smoke from the corner of her mouth.

  Otis set down his glass of whiskey and went into the living room. Through the front windows and the tangle of downed tree limbs in the yard, he could make out four young black men in a boat farther up the street. They had cut the gas feed and tilted the motor up on the stern of the boat, so the propeller would not catch on the curb as they drifted onto the flooded lawn of a darkened house.

  One of them stepped down into the water and pulled the boat by its painter toward the front door.

  “Why not give our black mayor a call?” Melanie said.

  “That kind of talk doesn’t help anything,” Otis said.

  Melanie was quiet a long time. He heard her mashing out her cigarette, then felt her standing close behind him. “Can you tell if they’re armed?” she asked.

  “I can’t see them well in the shadows.” Otis glanced through a side window. “There’s Tom Claggart. I suspect if those fellows want trouble, they’ll find it with Tom.”

  “Tom Claggart is a blowhard and an idiot. He’s also a whoremonger,” Melanie said.

  Otis turned and stared at his wife.

  “Don’t look at me like that. Tom’s wife told me he gave her syphilis. He and his buddies go to cathouses on their hunting trips.”

  Otis didn’t want to talk about Tom Claggart. “We can’t be responsible for what vandals do down the street. I’ll go out and yell at them, but the owners of those houses made a choice and that’s the way it is.”

  “Don’t provoke them. Where’s your rifle?”

  “Our house is well lighted. They can see it’s occupied. They won’t come here.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Their kind live under rocks, Melanie. They don’t do well in daylight.”

  She was standing even closer to him now, the nicotine in her breath touching his face. Her voice dropped into a whisper. “I’m scared, Otis,” she said. She slipped her arm in his. He could feel the point of her brea
st against him. He couldn’t remember when she had been so confessional in her need, so dependent upon his strength. “Put the rifle in our bedroom. I know you have it. I saw you with it the other day.”

  “I’ll keep it close by. I promise.”

  She let out her breath and rested her cheek against his shoulder. In ten seconds’ time the embittered woman he had been living with had disappeared and been replaced by the lovely, intelligent woman he had met on a Bahamian beach, under the stars, years ago.

  Otis waited until Melanie and Thelma were setting the dining room table, then removed a pair of binoculars from his desk in the den and focused them on the men who were breaking into homes on the other side of the neutral ground. Tom Claggart tapped on the side window. Otis unlocked the French doors and pulled them open.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “The Snoop Dogg fan club is looting the goddamn neighborhood is what,” Tom said.

  “What do you want me to do about it?”

  Tom Claggart’s shaved head was pinpointed with sweat in the humidity, his muscle shirt streaked with dirt. “We need to take back our fucking neighborhood. You want in or not?”

  “What I want is for you not to use that kind of language around my home.”

  “Those guys out there file their teeth, Otis. Considering what happened to Thelma, you of all people should know that.”

  “If they try to come in my home, I’ll kill them. So far they haven’t tried to do that. Now go back to your family, Tom.”

  “My family left.” Tom’s face was flat when he said it, his buckshot eyes round and dead, as though he were announcing a fact he himself had not yet assimilated.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t help you,” Otis said.

  Otis closed the French doors and locked them. As he looked at Tom’s expression through the glass, he felt a deep sense of sorrow for him, the same way he had once felt toward his uneducated, work-exhausted father whose sense of self-worth was so low he had to put on a Klansman’s robes to know who he was.

  “Who was that?” Thelma asked.

  “A fellow who will never own anything of value,” Otis said.

  “What’s that mean?” Thelma asked.

  “It means let’s eat,” Otis said, patting her fondly on the back.

  But a few minutes later Otis Baylor realized he had arrived at one of those intersections in life when a seemingly inconsequential decision or event changes one’s direction forever. He had forgotten to return the binoculars to the desk drawer and in the fading twilight Thelma had picked them up and begun scanning the street with them.

  She froze and a muted sound rose from her throat, as though she had stepped on a sharp stone.

  “What’s wrong, kiddo?” he asked.

  “Those guys in the boat,” she replied.

  “They’ll take what they want and they’ll go away. They won’t come here.”

  “No, it’s them, Daddy.”

  He took the binoculars from her and fixed them on the four black males who had now worked their way farther down the street, still on the opposite side of the neutral ground. “Those are the men who attacked you?” he said.

  “The one in the front of the boat is for sure. He kept lighting cigarettes and laughing while they did it to me,” she said. “The guy behind him, the one with the hammer in his hand, he looks just like the guy who-”

  “What?”

  Her face was beginning to crumple now. “Who made me put it in my mouth,” she said.

  Otis cleared his throat slightly, as though a tiny piece of bone were caught in it. He could feel his chest laboring for his next breath, his palms opening and closing at his sides, his mouth drier than he could remember. “You’re absolutely certain?”

  “You don’t believe me? You think I would just pick out some black guys I never saw before and lie about them? Is that what you think of me?”

  The pathos in her face was such he could hardly look at it.

  He walked out on his front porch and stared down the street at the four men. Their boat was a big aluminum one, painted green, the black men and the green boat almost lost in the shadows of the building. He climbed the stairs to the second floor and in the hallway pulled down the lanyard on the collapsible steps that folded into the attic. His Springfield was propped against a cardboard box packed with his dead mother’s clothes, which he could not bring himself to give away. The rifle had been a present from his father on Otis’s sixteenth birthday and was the best gift Otis had ever received, primarily because his father had owned very little, not even the clapboard house in which they lived, and the most dear of his possessions had been his Springfield rifle.

  It still had its original military dark-grained stock and leather sling and iron sights, but the oiled smoothness of its action and the accuracy with which it fired a round had no peer.

  The attic was musty and dry, strangely comfortable and peaceful in the shadowy light of the single electric bulb that hung from a cord overhead. Otis unlocked the bolt and from a box of army-surplus ammunition began pressing one.30-06 shell after another into the rifle’s magazine. He felt the spring come tight under his thumb and slid the bolt forward, locking it down, a metal-jacketed, needle-nosed round resting snugly in the chamber.

  He climbed back down the folding steps and walked through his bedroom to the glass doors that gave onto the balcony. But the sky was dark now, the stars and moon veiled with smoke, the tangle of downed trees on his neighbors’ lawns impossible to see through. He opened the doors onto the balcony and stepped outside, wrapping his left forearm inside the rifle’s sling. The warm current of air rising from his flower beds made him think of spring, of new beginnings, of seasonal predictability. But the autumnal gas on the wind was a more realistic indicator of his situation, he thought. It was a season of death, and for Otis it had begun not with the hurricane but with the rape of his daughter.

  He had never tried to describe to others the rage he felt when he saw his daughter in the emergency room at Charity Hospital. Her attackers had even burned her breasts. A black policewoman had tried to console him, promising him that NOPD would do everything in its power to catch the men who had harmed Thelma. She said his daughter needed him. She said he should not have the thoughts he was having. She said he was a bystander now and that he must trust others to hunt down his daughter’s tormentors, that in effect the legalities of her case were not his business.

  The look Otis gave the policewoman made her face twitch. From that moment on he resolved he would never allow anyone access to the level of rage that churned inside him, not until he found the three faceless black men who lived quietly on the edges of his consciousness, twenty-four hours a day.

  Otis doubted that many people had any understanding of the thought processes, the obsession, a father enters into when he wakes each morning with the knowledge that the degenerates and cowards who ruined his daughter’s life are probably within a few miles of his house, laughing at what they have done. Perhaps the father’s emotions are atavistic in origin, he told himself, just as protection of the cave is. Perhaps those feelings are hardwired into the brain for a reason and are not to be contended with.

  After Thelma was arrested for possession of marijuana, Otis attended several Al-Anon meetings in the Garden District. The only other man there as reticent as he was a neatly groomed accountant who worked for a religious foundation. For five meetings the accountant sat politely in a chair and never volunteered a word. One night the group leader asked the accountant if the meetings had helped him or his alcoholic wife. The accountant seemed to consider the question for a moment. “When my daughter was raped by her teacher on a field trip I thought about laundering ten thousand dollars to have him castrated. But I still haven’t decided if that’s the right thing or not. So, yeah, I guess in a way you could say I’ve made some progress.”

  The room was so quiet Otis thought all the air had been sucked out of it. After the meeting, he followed the accountant to his car. It had just ra
ined and the night air was pungent with the smell of magnolia blossoms, pulsing with the sounds of tree frogs.

  “Hey?” Otis said.

  “Yeah?” the accountant said.

  “Have a good one, bud,” Otis said.

  “You trying to tell me something?” the accountant said.

  “I just did,” Otis replied.

  Now he was walking downstairs with a loaded rifle cradled against his chest. He could hear Thelma talking to Melanie in the kitchen, telling her she was sure that at least two of the men in the green boat were her attackers. Then she began to tell Melanie for the first time, in detail, what they had done to her.

  Otis stepped out on the mushiness of the St. Augustine grass that grew like a deep blue-green carpet on his lawn. Four houses down the street, on the opposite side, he could see a flashlight’s beam moving behind the second-story windows of a home where Varina Davis, the wife of the Confederate president, had once stayed. But he didn’t see the green boat and he wondered if he was watching the same vandals or a new group. He crossed Tom Claggart’s yard, walking on the dirty rim of water that covered the sidewalk and extended almost to Tom’s gallery. Suddenly he was bathed in white light from a battery-powered lantern that Tom had chosen, just at that moment, to carry out on the gallery.

  “Turn that thing off!” Otis said.

  “You got those guys spotted?” Tom asked.

  “I’m not sure. Go back inside, Tom.”

  “I got some guys coming over. We can close off the block and rip the whole problem out by its roots. Get my drift?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Tom clicked off his lantern. “Bang on the door if you need the cavalry,” he said. “My friends don’t take prisoners.”

  Otis sloshed into the street until his foot touched the curbing that bordered the neutral ground. But even on top of the neutral ground the water level was above his ankles and he could see the V-shaped wake of a cottonmouth moccasin swimming toward a mound of oak limbs that was draped over an automobile.

  He positioned himself behind the trunk of a palm tree and stared at the house from which he could hear glass breaking and furniture being overturned. In his mind’s eye he saw himself crashing through the front door, advancing up the stairs, and taking them out one by one, the exit wounds stippling the wallpaper with their blood, the impact of their bodies hitting the floor like bags of sand.