The Tin Roof Blowdown

by James Lee Burke

  “Why’d you kick me in the park?” he asked.

  “Where are we going?” Molly said.

  “Straight ahead. I’ll tell you what to do. You don’t talk anymore until I tell you to,” he replied. He nudged Alafair with the automatic. “You didn’t answer my question, darlin’.”

  “I kicked you in the mouth because you asked for it,” she said.

  “I did no such thing. You shouldn’t lie.”

  Alafair’s face was growing more intense, her features sharpening. He put his lips on the nape of her neck, then mussed her hair with his free hand.

  “Do you believe we let this sick fuck take over our car?” she said to Molly.

  “Miss, don’t talk like that to Ronald,” Tom Claggart said. “You don’t want to do that.”

  “What else can you do to us? You’re going to kill us. Look at you, you’re pathetic. You both have heads that look like foreskin. Who was your mother? She must have been inseminated by a yeast infection.”

  The effect of her words on the two men was different from what she had expected. Bledsoe cupped his hand under her chin and drew her head close to his mouth. Then he bit her hair. But it was Claggart who seemed to be losing control, as though he were witnessing a prelude to events he had seen before and did not want to see again. He became agitated, his eyes twitching. He rubbed his hands up and down on his thighs. Then he realized his raincoat was caught in the door. He began jerking at it, as though he were happy to have something to distract him.

  “Pull over. My coat is caught,” he said.

  “There’s a semi going fifty miles an hour on my bumper,” Molly said.

  “I don’t care. Pull over right now. Make her pull over, Ronald,” Claggart said.

  Then Claggart opened the door while the car was still moving. Molly swerved the wheel and he lurched sideways. Bledsoe wasn’t sure what was happening. In seconds, the environment he had imposed total control on was coming apart. He spit Alafair’s hair out of his mouth and grabbed Claggart’s arm, just as the open door was hit by a car traveling in the opposite direction.

  Alafair reached down on the floor. All in one motion, she pulled Molly’s.22 Ruger from her purse, worked the slide, and brought up the barrel into Ronald Bledsoe’s face. His eyes were filled with disbelief. But his bigger problem was the fact he was twisted in the seat, his own brother fighting with him over a raincoat, his shoulder jammed against the seat so he couldn’t get off a shot at Alafair. The next second was probably the longest in Ronald Bledsoe’s life.

  “Suck on this, you freak,” Alafair said.

  She pulled the trigger four times. The first round went into his mouth and punched through his cheek. The second embedded in his forearm when he lifted it in front of him, the third clipped off the end of a finger, and the fourth shattered his chin, slinging blood and saliva across the seat and the back window.

  Molly’s ears were deaf in the blowback of the Ruger. In the rearview mirror she saw Bledsoe staring back at her, his ruined mouth twisted like soft rubber, his concave face like a cartoon that was incapable of understanding the damage it had just incurred.

  Molly’s car struck the curb and came to a stop, cars swerving around her in the mist, their horns blowing. Alafair jumped from the car and pulled Bledsoe out the back door onto the concrete. She reached down and picked up his gun from the floor and threw it into the shrubbery on the edge of the cemetery. Tom Claggart sat frozen in the seat, his raincoat and shirt whipsawed with blood.

  Bledsoe stared up at her from the gutter, waiting, his eyes genuinely puzzled, as a child might look up from its crib at the looming presence of its mother. Alafair extended the Ruger with both hands, aiming it into the center of his forehead.

  “Alafair-” Molly said, almost in a whisper.

  Alafair’s knuckles whitened on the Ruger’s grips.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Molly said.

  “What?” Alafair said angrily.

  “We never give them power.”

  “He’ll be back.”

  “I doubt it. But if he does, we still don’t give them power.”

  Alafair widened her eyes, releasing her breath, and stepped backward, clicking on the Ruger’s safety with her thumb. She swallowed and looked at Molly, her eyes filming.

  By the time Clete and I arrived at the scene, Alafair and Molly were sitting in the back of a cruiser, talking to a detective in the front seat. Tom Claggart was in handcuffs behind the wire-mesh grille of a second cruiser, and two paramedics were loading Ronald Bledsoe into an Acadiana ambulance.

  Alafair got out of the cruiser when she saw me walking toward her from the truck. The detective had given her a roll of paper towels and she was scrubbing her hair with them, lifting her chin, flipping a strand out of her eyes. She looked absolutely beautiful, like a young girl emerging from a sun shower. “What’s the haps, Streak?” she said.

  “No haps, Alf,” I said.

  “Don’t call me that stupid name,” she said.

  Molly leaned forward in the backseat of the cruiser, beaming. She gave me the thumbs-up sign with both hands. “What kept you?” she said.

  Epilogue

  I HAVE LONG SUBSCRIBED to the belief that the dead lay strong claim on the quick, that indeed their spirits wander and manifest themselves in the middle of our waking day and whisper to us when we least expect it. Many years ago, during a very bad time in my life, my murdered wife would talk to me out of the rain. Members of my platoon who I knew were KIA would call me up long-distance during an electric storm. Inside the static, I could hear their voices-cacophonous, sometimes frightened and nonsensical, sometimes breaking apart, like a walkie-talkie transmission when the sender is too far away.

  A psychotherapist told me I was experiencing a psychotic episode. I didn’t argue with him.

  But if these experiences have ever happened to you, I’m sure you have come to the same conclusion about them as I. You know what you heard and you know what you saw, and you no more doubt the validity of your experience than you doubt the existence of the sunrise. A great change has occurred in you, and the change lies in the fact you no longer have to convince others about your vision of the world, not of this one or the next.

  New Orleans was a song that went under the waves. Sometimes in my dreams I see a city beneath the sea. In it, green-painted iron streetcars made in the year 1910 still lumber down the neutral ground through the Garden District, past block upon block of Victorian and antebellum homes, past the windmill palms and the gigantic live oaks, past guesthouses and the outdoor cafés and art deco restaurants whose scrolled purple and pink and green neon burn in the mist like smoke from marker grenades.

  Every hotel on Canal still features an orchestra on the roof, where people dance under the stars and convince one another that the mildness of the season is eternal and was created especially for them. In the distance, Lake Pontchartrain is wine-dark, flanged with palm trees, and pelicans skim above the chop, the rides at the waterside amusement park glowing whitely against the sky. Irving Fazola is playing at the Famous Door and Pete Fountain at his own joint off Bourbon. Jackson Square is a medieval plaza where jugglers, mimes, string bands, and unicyclists with umbrellas strapped on top of their heads perform in front of St. Louis Cathedral. No one is concerned with clocks. The city is as sybaritic as it is religious. Even death becomes an excuse for celebration.

  Perhaps the city has found its permanence inside its own demise, like Atlantis, trapped forever under the waves, the sun never harsh, filtered through the green tint of the ocean so that neither rust nor moth nor decay ever touches its face.

  That’s the dream that I have. But the reality is otherwise. Category 5 hurricanes don’t take prisoners and the sow that eats its farrow doesn’t surrender self-interest in the cause of mercy.

  New Orleans was systematically destroyed and that destruction began in the early 1980s with the deliberate reduction by half of federal funding to the City and the simultaneous introduction of crack cocaine i
nto the welfare projects. The failure to repair the levees before Katrina and the abandonment of tens of thousands of people to their fate in the aftermath have causes that I’ll let others sort out. But in my view the irrevocable fact remains that we saw an American City turned into Baghdad on the southern rim of the United States. If we have a precedent in our history for what happened in New Orleans, it’s lost on me.

  Ronald Bledsoe was sentenced to twenty years in Angola Prison for the abduction of my wife and daughter. I believe he and Bobby Mack Rydel and probably others murdered Andre Rochon and Courtney Degravelle and Sidney Kovick’s hirelings, but Bledsoe gave nobody up.

  I do not believe Bledsoe qualifies as a “solid” or “stand-up” con. Ronald Bledsoe belongs to that group who take their secrets to the grave. They never reveal the nature of their compulsion, their motivations, or the methods they use. Paradoxically, psychiatrists and prison administrators and journalists eventually create a composite explanation for sociopathic behavior that gives them a human personality and works in their interests. My own belief is that people like Bledsoe pose theological questions to us that psychologists cannot answer.

  My only fear is that one day Ronald Bledsoe will be released from prison. If that happens, I’ll be waiting for him. I would like to say the last statement brings me consolation. But it doesn’t. Sometimes I have a disturbing dream about Bledsoe and I wake before dawn and go out into the yard and drink coffee at our redwood table until the darkness leaves the sky. Then the day takes on its ordinary shape and I go about doing all the ordinary things that ordinary people do.

  Tom Claggart, Bledsoe’s half brother, tried to implicate everyone he could, except himself. If he is to be believed, he unknowingly became involved with a diamond-smuggling operation in Buenos Aires, one fronted by Mideastern operatives, and raised capital through Sidney Kovick and Bo Diddley Wiggins. Sidney got hit with a bolt of patriOtism and took the diamonds off a Mideastern courier, along with his dope and a pistol and thousands of dollars in counterfeit money. Sidney ’s patriotic fervor did not include turning the diamonds or the queer bills over to the Treasury Department, Homeland Security, or U.S. Customs.

  The upshot?

  Guess.

  Tom Claggart is now hoeing soybeans for the State of Louisiana, and Sidney is running his flower store and Bo Diddley and his bovine wife are whocking golf balls with over-the-hill television celebrities at a Lafayette country club. I saw Bo three days ago, at a shopping center, his arms loaded with parcels. He shook my hand enthusiastically, his face full of warmth, his grip moist and firm. There wasn’t a fleck of guilt or ill ease in his eyes. I probably should have simply returned his greeting and walked away, but too much had happened and too many people had been hurt.

  “Bo, the Degravelle woman was tortured to death,” I said.

  The skin under one eye seemed to wrinkle just a moment. “I don’t know what you’re getting at, but the way the Feds explained it to me, that woman was passing phony money or something.”

  “Have a good day, Bo. I probably won’t be seeing you again, but I hope everything works out for you,” I said. “If you see my daughter, you stay away from her.”

  He tried to get a firmer hold on his parcels, almost dropping one. “Yeah, sure, see you around,” he said, unable to put together the implication of my words.

  Melanie Baylor avoided manslaughter charges and got one year in a federal lockup on a civil rights beef. I receive postcards from her every two or three weeks, each one indicating ways I can improve my spirituality through various 12-step programs. My favorite included these lines: Detective Robicheaux, there are those among us who are psychologically incapable of honesty. But there is hope even for these. Sir, don’t give up. I and others here are praying for you.

  Otis Baylor has opened up an independent insurance agency as well as a grocery store he co-owns with a Laotian refugee who at one time was an opium grower and CIA mercenary. If there is a purgatory, I believe Our Lord will vouchsafe Otis’s marriage to Melanie as payment in full for any debts he might owe.

  Clete is still Clete. He seems to have accepted the destruction of the place where he was born, but he no longer refers to it as “The Big Sleazy.” I wish he did, though, because that would mean the City under the sea I dream about is still alive. There was only one strange development about Clete in the aftermath of this story, one he will not talk about or explain.

  I went back to the Ninth Ward to check on Bertrand Melancon’s grandmother and aunt. I also wanted to check on Bertrand, because I thought Clete still intended to pick him up as a bail skip and return him to custody. But the house of Bertrand’s aunt was empty, the yard piled to the eaves with debris from other teardowns on the block. When I asked the neighbors what had happened to the aunt and grandmother, they said a white man in a blue cadillac convertible had brought some FEMA people to the house and the FEMA people had taken the two elderly women to a hospital in North Louisiana.

  “Where did Bertrand go?” I asked.

  No one seemed to know. But when I was about to leave, an old man whose back was terribly bowed and who walked with two canes made his way out to my truck. His skin was so black it looked like tar on his bones. “You gonna arrest that boy?” he asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Cain’t say he don’t deserve it, but I t’ink somet’ing bad already happened to him.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “One night right after his auntie and grandmother left, he got aholt of a rowboat and a trailer. I said to him, ‘Where you t’ink you going wit’ a rowboat?’ He pointed to the sout’ and said, ‘Way on out yonder.’

  “I said, ‘there ain’t nothing out there but water. All the trees, all the land, is tore up. Ain’t nothing but water far as the eye can see. Ain’t nothing but dead people in that water, either.’

  “He said, ‘it don’t matter to me. That’s where I’m going.’”

  “He didn’t say where, huh?” I asked.

  “It don’t matter where he go. Boy ain’t never had peace. He ain’t gonna have it now.”

  I thanked him and drove away. For a long time I could still see him in my rearview mirror, propped on his canes, dust drifting off my wheels into his face, surrounded by amounts of wreckage that perhaps no one can adequately describe.

  I didn’t like Bertrand Melancon or, better said, I didn’t like the world he represented. But as I have to remind myself daily, many of the people I deal with did not get to choose the world in which they were born. Some try to escape it, some embrace it, most are overcome and buried by it. After his brother was shot, I think Bertrand tried to become the person he could have been if he’d had a better shake when he was a kid. But who knows? Like Clete says, going up or coming down, it’s only rock ’n’ roll. Bertrand was able to perform a couple of noble deeds before he disappeared. That’s more than we expect from most men who started off life as he did.

  Sometimes at twilight, when Clete and I are out on the salt and we can look northward at the vast green-gray misty rim of the Louisiana coastline, I have a fantasy about Bertrand Melancon and my old friend Father Jude LeBlanc, whose only trepidation in life was his fear that the uncontrollable shaking in his hands would cause him to drop the chalice while he was giving Communion.

  In my fantasy, I see Bertrand far out on the water, pulling on the oars, his arms pumped with his task, the ruined City of New Orleans becoming smaller and smaller in the distance, a great darkness spreading across the sky just after sunset. The blisters on his hands turn into wounds that stain the wood of the oars with his blood. As the wind rises and the water becomes even blacker, he sees hundreds if not thousands of lights swimming below the surface. Then he realizes the lights are not lights at all. They have the shape of broken Communion wafers and the luminosity that radiates from them lies in the very fact they have been rejected and broken. But in a way he cannot understand, Bertrand knows that somehow all of them are safe now, including himself, inside a pewter vessel t
hat is as big as the hand of God.

  ***

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