The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  Texas was going to take the hit. Our exposure would be marginal, nothing more than minor wind damage, trees knocked down, a temporary power outage. We breathed a sigh of relief. Providence had given us a free pass.

  Then the National Hurricane Center in Miami disabused us of our hubris. In fact, the forecast was unbelievable. Louisiana was about to get pounded full-force, with twenty-foot tidal surges and wind that would rip off roofs from Sabine Pass to the other side of the Atchafalaya River. More unbelievably, we were being told the storm would probably make landfall in Cameron Parish, just south of Lake Charles, the same place the eye of Audrey swept through in 1957. The tidal wave that preceded the ’57 storm curled over the courthouse and downtown area like a giant hammer and crushed it into rubble, killing close to five hundred people.

  “Weren’t you around when Audrey hit?” a deputy asked as I stared up at the television screen.

  “Yeah, I was,” I replied.

  “On an oil rig?”

  “On a seismograph barge,” I said.

  “It was pretty bad, huh?”

  “We got through it okay,” I said.

  He was a crew-cut, martial-looking man, with too much starch in his uniform and a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. He removed the toothpick and dropped it in a waste can and focused his attention on the television screen. I could hear a wet sound in his throat when he swallowed.

  No one wants to go to the same war twice. You pay your dues in order to enter the dead zone and you’re supposed to be safe. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works.

  Chapter 13

  NEW IBERIA AND LAFAYETTE were now filled with evacuees fleeing Hurricane Rita as well as those who had fled Katrina. Firearm and ammunition sales were booming. The original sympathy for the evacuees from New Orleans was incurring a strange transformation. Right-wing talk shows abounded with callers viscerally enraged at the fact evacuees were receiving a onetime two-thousand-dollar payment to help them buy food and find lodging. The old southern nemesis was back, naked and raw and dripping-absolute hatred for the poorest of the poor.

  AT SUNSET Friday evening the air was as gold as pollen, as though Indian summer were upon us. The decrease in barometric pressure seemed to signal little more than a shower. What appeared to be rain rings were bream dimpling the surface on the edge of the lily pads. I could hear my elderly neighbor playing the piano behind an open window. Then the air grew cool and moist, and leaves began stripping from the trees in the yard, whirling in vortexes down the slope to the water. As the sky filled with dust, a shadow spread over the yards and gardens of the homes along East Main, and the bayou was suddenly wrinkled by a hard wind blowing from the southeast. My neighbor got up from her piano and began slamming down windows.

  From my back steps I saw the aluminum roof of a picnic shelter in City Park peel away like the top of a sardine can and tumble end over end across the grass. I saw a man continue fishing when lightning struck an oak tree in the center of the park. I saw a man stripped to the waist in an airboat roar past our property, smiling serenely at the heavens. I heard a civil defense siren blowing at City Hall.

  I went on duty at midnight and was given the opportunity to meditate once again on the biblical admonition that the sun is made to rise upon both the evil and the good, and the rain is sent to fall upon the just and unjust alike. Except for ripped shingles or tree limbs crashing on telephone or power lines, East Main was spared. But in south Iberia Parish, twelve feet of water surged into trailers and low-lying homes. That was nothing compared to the fate of the coastal parishes.

  A tidal wave of salt water, mud, dead fish, oil sludge, and organic debris literally effaced the southern rim of Louisiana. Farther inland, what it did not efface, it ruined. Throughout the wetlands, almost every home was made uninhabitable, every telephone pole broken at ground level, every road made impassable. The rice and sugarcane fields were encrusted with saline, the farm machinery buried in mud, the settlements down by the Gulf reduced to twisted pieces of plumbing sticking out of grit that looked like emery paper.

  The greatest suffering was incurred by animals. An estimated hundred thousand cattle drowned in Vermilion and Cameron parishes alone. They crowded onto galleries, tried to climb onto tractors and cane wagons, and even ended up on rooftops. But they drowned just the same.

  I stood on top of a hay baler with a pair of binoculars and, facing south, made a one-hundred-eighty-degree sweep from east to west and back again. I could not see a living creature. Not a dog or a cat, not even a bird. The trees had been stripped to the bark and looked like gnarled fingers. Brick houses were blown into birdshot. Fifty-foot shrimp boats lay upside down a hundred yards from water. Drowned sheep were stacked inside the floodgate of an irrigation lock, like zoo animals crowding against the bars of their cage. Cemetery crypts were obliterated, and the coffins washed into residential yards and in one instance through the broken front window of a country store. I saw at least thirty head of Herefords tangled in a barbed-wire fence, their stomachs bloated in the heat, swarms of gnats hovering above them.

  By Monday morning I was used up.

  “Go home, Streak,” Helen said.

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll go home when you do,” I said.

  “I went home last night and came back. I ate supper and put on fresh clothes. I also took a nap. I put you in charge while I was gone.”

  I stared at her emptily.

  “Go home, bwana,” she said.

  As I drove into New Iberia, the streets were drying in the sunshine, the sidewalks plastered with wet leaves. I parked my truck in my driveway and went inside the house. But Alafair and Molly and Clete were gone. I stripped off my clothes in the emptiness of the house and got in the shower, like the war veteran returning from a place that is still locked in his head but which he will never tell anyone about. Then I sat in the bottom of the stall, the water splaying on my back, and fell sound asleep.

  WHILE RITA WAS shredding the coast of Louisiana, Eddy Melancon lay propped up in a bed close by a fourth-floor window at Our Lady of the Lake in Baton Rouge. He had a fine view of the night sky and the elevated interstate highway and the sheets of rain sweeping across the lines of cars entering and leaving the city. But Eddy cared little about the view or the fact a nurse had gone out of her way to move his bed and prop him up so he could look out upon the city and the light show in the sky. The truth was, Eddy Melancon could not stop thinking about his own person. It lay there, in the bed, as though dropped from ten thousand feet, disconnected from all motor controls, insentient, flaccid, and fed by tubes whose needles punctured his veins without Eddy’s feeling them.

  It was like being buried alive inside his own body. Each time he fell asleep, he saw broken images in his head leading up to the moment somebody had locked down on him with a high-powered rifle. He heard the sound of the tiny emery wheel striking dryly on his cigarette lighter, then he both heard and smelled the flare of lighter fluid inside the flame guard. Just as he sucked the smoke deep into his lungs, he saw a needle-nosed projectile zipping over the floodwater, flying through the fire, making a thropping sound as it entered and exited his body, splintering his spinal cord like it was dried tuber.

  In the dream, he wanted to wrap his arms over his face or dive into the water. But he couldn’t move or run or even drop the burning lighter from his hand. When he would wake, he would believe for just a moment that his terror was the result of a nightmare and that his motor control was now restored, that he could walk to a bathroom and urinate into a bowl while the day and the world adjusted to his needs. But his paralysis encased him like concrete. He would push out his tongue on his lips and close and open his eyes in the dark, waiting for either movement or sensation to find its way back into his body. He would drop his eyes to where his hands lay on the sheet and wait for them to obey his mental commands. That’s when he would hear a scream inside his head that was louder than any voice he had ever heard in
the actual world.

  Eddy studied the curtains of rain sliding down his window and the patterns of shadow they made on his skin. When the two men in hospital greens entered his room, he thought they were going to check his catheter or sponge-bathe him or hold a glass drinking straw to his mouth. Or maybe they would talk to him. His voice box had been spared. As long as he could talk, he still possessed a measure of control in his life. He could talk to these guys about his recovery. There must be ways to repair spinal breaks, he thought. Yeah, it was just a matter of getting to a better hospital in Houston or Boston or New York, places like that. Bertrand must have stashed the money from the house score. There would be plenty for good doctors and rehab programs. Yeah, let these local motherfuckers go play wit’ their bedpans, he told himself.

  One of the men in greens stared down at Eddy, his face floating above him like a white balloon. “How you feeling?” he asked.

  “I’m feeling okay,” Eddy whispered.

  Why had he answered like that? Like some kid spitting watermelon seeds and tap-dancing for Mr. Charlie. That’s not the way he had talked to the hospital personnel before. What was different about this guy?

  “Because we want you to be comfortable for the ride down to the OR,” the same man said.

  “It’s the middle of the night,” Eddy said.

  “Everything is haywire, Eddy. This storm really screwed us up,” the man said. He yawned and looked at his watch. “Let’s get you down the hall. I got to get home to my kids.”

  The second man positioned a gurney next to Eddy’s bed. When a tree of lightning printed itself against a backdrop of black sky, Eddy saw the man’s face clearly. It was concave, the eyes recessed, the head elongated and bald, the lips the pink shade of an eraser on a pencil. The second man began disconnecting the wires and tubes that only moments earlier Eddy had looked upon as an annoyance.

  “What you doin’, man?” he said.

  The man with the concave face smiled down at him. “Relax. You’re in good hands,” he said.

  Then the two men in greens lifted him as though he were weightless and set him gently on the gurney. As they pushed him through the corridor toward the elevator, they kept glancing down at him with benevolent expressions, their hands patting him reassuringly whenever he started to speak. On the first floor he heard the elevator doors open, then he felt the gurney’s wheels rumbling through a passageway. A moment later there was a whoosh of air and the sound of doors sliding again, and he could smell rain and engine exhaust and hear sirens pealing through the streets.

  The two men lifted the gurney and loaded it into the back of an ambulance.

  “Who y’all? What y’all doin’ to me?” Eddy said. “Help!”

  The man with the concave face and recessed eyes got inside with him and shut the door. Eddy’s weight shifted on the gurney as the ambulance pulled out onto the street and drove away at high speed.

  “Scared?” the man said.

  “Ain’t scared of nothing,” Eddy replied. “Not of no peckerwoods, not of nothing.”

  “You ought to be,” the man said, inserting a chocolate bar into his mouth. He smiled as he chewed on the chocolate.

  CLETE PURCEL worked out of his secondary office on main and stayed at our house, but he returned to New Orleans three times in his pursuit of the Melancon brothers and Andre Rochon. He used a city map to re-create the possible routes Bertrand Melancon could have used in his escape from Otis Baylor’s neighborhood immediately following the shooting. He walked through backyards and alleys and at a residential intersection found a woman throwing the remnants of her kitchen onto her terrace, smashing dishes and glass-ware on the flagstones.

  “Can I help you?” she said when she saw him watching her. Sweat was leaking out of her hair band.

  He showed her his PI badge and told her about the shooting down the street. He gave her the date and the approximate time the shooting took place.

  “I know all about it. I think they got what they deserved,” she said. She wore a halter and shorts and flip-flops, and she had chestnut hair that hung in strands on her brow. Her skin was unnaturally white and dotted with moles. Clete doubted if she was the type who would be seen in halter and shorts were it not for the intense heat inside her house.

  “Two of those guys are still on the loose. I’d like to find them. They were in a green aluminum boat, with an outboard motor on it.”

  “What, you think they’re parked somewhere on the street waiting for you?”

  “No, I think they dumped some stolen property around here. I’d like to recover it for my client.”

  She walked out on the edge of her lawn. She put her hands on her hips and stared at the intersection. There were blue veins in the tops of her breasts. “I saw an outboard like that almost hit an airboat full of cops. A black man was in the stern. It looked like another guy was slumped down in the bilge. They swung around behind my house and went up the alley. Were they the ones you’re after?”

  “It sounds like them. Did they stop?”

  “I wish they had.”

  “Pardon?”

  “If looters broke into my house, I was going to serve them ham sandwiches I’d filled with rat poison. I mixed the poison with mustard so they couldn’t taste it. I made a dozen of them.”

  Clete finished jotting down her words about the boat in his notebook. “Mind if I ask you a personal question?”

  “What is it?” she said, her left eye wrinkling at the corner.

  “Why are you smashing your dishware?”

  “Because the goddamn insurance company just told me my policy doesn’t cover water damage. Because I thought I’d give their worthless asses breakage they could understand. Because they just fucked me out of every cent I got from my divorce.”

  Clete looked down the street, suppressing a smile. “Sorry, I didn’t get your name. Like to take a break, get something to eat?” he said.

  IT WAS NOON, Wednesday, and I was in Clete’s New Iberia office, located in a refurbished brick building on Main Street, listening to his account of his most recent trip to New Orleans. The nineteenth-century tin ceiling was stamped with a fleur-de-lis design and the walls were decorated with antique firearms. Outside the rear window was a brick-paved patio, shaded by potted palm and banana trees, where Clete often ate his lunch. But today he couldn’t stop talking about the Melancon brothers and Andre Rochon and the new woman he had met down the street from Otis Baylor’s house.

  I believed Clete was still wired from Katrina and was now giving himself over to an obsession, one that allowed him to believe if he nailed the guys who had run over him with their automobile, he could somehow revise all the events that had turned a gingerbread Caribbean city into food for every kind of jackal in the book.

  “I got it figured, big mon,” he said. “Bertrand Melancon almost collided into an airboat full of NOPD guys, so he swerved down this alley behind Courtney’s house-”

  “Whose house?”

  “The gal I told you about, the one breaking dishes all over her terrace. Bertrand bagged it down the alley and hid Sidney Kovick’s goods somewhere along the way. The hospital is only three blocks from Courtney’s. I think I even found his boat. It was wedged under a pile of trees. The motor was gone, but it’s a green, aluminum job. Ducks Unlimited is painted on the hull. I bet they boosted it from a rescue operation.”

  “I think you’re spending more time on these guys than you should,” I said.

  “How’d you arrive at that brilliant idea?”

  “Twisting these guys won’t bring back New Orleans, Clete. It’s gone. Just like our youth. The place we knew will be a place we look at in books that feature historical photography.”

  He got up from behind his desk and stared out the window. He was wearing a short-sleeved green shirt with bluebirds and flowers printed on it. The back of his neck was pitted, his hair lightly oiled and clipped. I could see the color rising in his neck. “Don’t say that about New Orleans.”

 
; “All right, I won’t. The guys who let people drown for two days are going to pour billions into rebuilding poor neighborhoods.”

  He turned and faced me. The flattened scar that ran through one eyebrow and across his nose was the dull color and shape of an elongated tire patch. “The shield I carry could have come out of a cereal box. The only credibility I have is the degree of respect I instill in scum like the Melancons. I wish it was different. I wish I was still with NOPD. But I flushed my legitimate career a long time ago. Don’t be lecturing at me, Streak.”

  The room was silent a long time.

  “I got a call this morning on my cell from Bertrand Melancon,” he said.

  “The Melancons have your number?” I replied, glad to have something else to talk about.

  “Nig gave it to Bertrand. He says his brother was kidnapped out of our Lady of the Lake. He wants me to get him back. That’s what I was trying to tell you, but you kept interrupting me.”

  “Who kidnapped him?”

  “Bertrand thinks it was Sidney Kovick’s people.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I don’t work for street pukes, particularly ones I think are rapists.”

  “What’s the rest of it?”

  “I made a mistake. I should have figured out a way to bring him in. Bertrand must have found something in that house he can’t fence. In fact, I got the impression he’s not sure what he’s holding.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  “That’s what I told Bertrand. He wants to cut a deal with Sidney to get his brother back, but he thinks whatever it is he’s holding is so hot Sidney is going to kill him and Eddy and Andre Rochon once he gets it back.”