James Burke - The Tin Roof Blowdown

“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.

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 breast 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.”