James Burke - The Tin Roof Blowdown

“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 In ten seconds’ time the embittered woman he had been living with had disappeared and been replaced by the lovely, intelligent woman he had met on a Bahamian beach, under the stars, years ago.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.”