James Burke - The Tin Roof Blowdown

“No, I didn’t. Step outside with me.”

“It was Air Force One. After three days the Shrubster did a fly-over. Gee, I feel better now.”

“Did you hear me?”

He leaned over the counter, filled his mug from the tap, and poured a jigger of Beam into it. He upended the mug, drinking it to the bottom, his eyes fastened on mine. He smiled, his face suffused with warmth. “This is our country, big mon. We fought for it,” he said. “I say screw all these cocksuckers. Nobody jacks the Big Sleazy when the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are on the job.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. But in AA you do not try to reason with drunks. In Clete Purcel’s case, you did not invade the private cathedral where he sometimes lived.

“I’ll tell Helen you’ll catch us later,” I said.

He laid the full weight of his big arm across my shoulders and walked with me to the door. The cloud of testosterone and beer sweat that rose from his armpit was suffocating.

“Give me an hour. I just need to clean up and fix some supper for me and Dominique,” he said.

“Supper?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“That woman isn’t from France. She used to work in a massage parlor in Lafayette. She was one of Stevie Giacano’s whores.”

“Who’s perfect? You’ve got something negative to say about every woman I meet.”

“That’s a comment on your judgment, not mine.”

I saw the hurt flicker in his face before I could take back my words. He took his arm from my shoulders and stepped out on the sidewalk. The street was strewn with plaster, broken glass, chimney bricks, beer cans and red plastic beer cups, roofing shingles, and thousands of water beetles that had been forced up through the sewer grates and that snapped under your feet when you stepped on them. But in the waning of the afternoon, in the pool of shadow made by the building at our back, in the popping of a Mardi Gras flag someone had hung on a staff from a balcony, I felt for just a moment that an older and fonder vision of New Orleans might still be available to us.

“I’m sorry for what I said, Clete.”

His eyes crinkled, threading with white lines at the corners. He pulled a slip of paper out of his shirt pocket with two fingers and offered it to me. “Aside from her painting career, Dominique coincidentally knows every working girl in the Quarter. You still want to find that junkie priest who’s hooked up with the sister of the MS-13 dude?” he said.

You didn’t put the slide or the glide on Clete Purcel.

ON OUR WAY back to rendezvous with Helen, we stopped at the second-story apartment where Jude LeBlanc lived with the Hispanic woman by the name of Natalia Ramos. But the apartment door was locked and the shutters latched. A neighbor, a Cajun woman who had ridden out the storm, said Jude had left the apartment for the Ninth Ward on Friday afternoon and Natalia had decided to join him. “I heard there’s bad t’ings happening down there. Maybe they ain’t coming back, no,” the neighbor said.

“Do you know where they went in the Ninth?” I asked.

“There’s a church down there that don’t ax no questions about him. Natalia said it’s made of stucco and got a bell tower,” she replied.

“Thank you,” I said, and started to go.

“Hey, you?” the neighbor said.

“Yes?”

“Maybe he ain’t doing right, a priest living wit’ a woman and all, but that’s a good man, yeah.”

That night was one of surreal images that I suspect have their origins more in the unconscious than in the conscious mind. People looked and behaved as they do in our sleep-not quite real, their bodies iridescent with sweat, their clothes in rags, like creatures living out their destinies on moonscape.

I saw a man rowing a boat, vigorously pulling on the oars, his back turned toward two bodies that were piled in the bow, his face set with stoic determination, as though his efforts could undo fate’s worst cut.

I saw a black baby hung in the branches of a tree, its tiny hands trailing in the current, its plastic diaper immaculate in the moonlight. I saw people eating from plastic packages of mustard and ketchup they had looted from a café, dividing what they had among themselves. Ten feet from them a dead cow matted with flies lay in the back of a wrecked pickup, a lead rope twisted around its neck.

A gelatinous fat man wearing boxer trunks and mirrored sunglasses floated past us on a bed of inner tubes, a twelve-pack of beer balanced on his stomach, one hand held high in a toast to a passing airboat.

“You want a ride up to high ground?” I said.

“And miss the show? Are you kidding?” he replied, ripping open another beer.

I saw kids running from an antebellum home they had just torched, silhouetted against the flames, like pranksters trick-or-treating on Halloween. When the gas lines exploded, sparks showered down on the entire neighborhood. Two blocks away vigilantes with shotguns and deer rifles prowled the flooded streets in a bass boat powered by an electric motor. One of them wore a headlamp, another a safari hat with a leopard-skin band. They were all sharing drinks from a silver flask and happy as hogs rolling in shit. I don’t know if they found their prey or not. In fact, at the time I was too tired to care.

We heard rumors that teams of elite troops, Special Forces or Rangers or Navy SEALs, were taking out snipers under a black flag. We heard that an alligator ate a deer on the second story of a flooded house by the Industrial Canal. Some NOPD cops said the personnel at Orleans Parish Prison had blown town and left the inmates to drown. Others said a downtown Mob rushed a command center, thinking food and water were being distributed. A deputy panicked and began firing an automatic weapon into the night sky, quickly adding to the widespread conviction that cops were arbitrarily killing innocent people.

The number of looters and arsonists and dangerous felons in custody was growing by the hour, with no place to put them. We kicked looters loose, only to see them recycled back into a temporary holding area two hours later. Some of those in custody were probably murderers-drug dealers or sociopaths who had taken advantage of the storm to eliminate the competition or settle old grudges. When a chain-link jail was created at the airport, we started packing the worst of the bunch into school buses for the trip up I-10 into Jefferson Parish.

That’s when I heard a woman on a wrist chain screaming at an Iberia deputy who was trying to push her up onto the steps of a waiting bus. She sat down heavily on the curb, pulling others down with her.

“What’s going on, Top?” I asked the deputy.

“She spit on a fireman and scratched his face. She started yelling about a priest on a church roof,” the deputy said. “I think she’s nuts. She was also holding a few pharmaceuticals.”

The woman looked Hispanic and wore a filthy purple sundress with bone-colored flowers printed on it. Her hair and skin were greasy with oil, her bare feet bloody.

“Who’s the priest?” I asked her.

She looked up at me. “Father LeBlanc,” she answered.

“Jude LeBlanc?” I asked.

“You know him?” she said.

“I knew a priest by that name in New Iberia. Where is he?”

“In the Lower Nine, at St. Mary Magdalene. He filled in there sometimes because they ain’t got no regular priest.”

“Can you kick her loose?” I asked the deputy.

“Gladly,” the deputy said, leaning down to the chain with his cuff key.

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.”