James Burke - The Tin Roof Blowdown

“Look, me and Eddy got a surprise for you. That last house had some money in a wall. We’re gonna give y’all your cut now, in case something go sout’ and some of us get picked up,” Bertrand said.

There was no sound in the room. Andre was seated on a metal desk, drinking from a warm can of Coca-Cola he’d found under a destroyed display rack out front. He had thrown away his soiled LSU T-shirt and in the flashes of heat lightning through the window his skin was the color of dusty leather, his nipples like brown dimes. “How come we just hearing about that now?” he asked.

Bertrand slapped a mosquito on his neck and studied it. “’Cause I didn’t want no complications back there,” he said. “’Cause I don’t be explaining everything as we go. ’Cause you getting cut in on what you ain’t found, Andre, wit’ an equal share for your young relative here, even though you and him ain’t had nothing to do wit’ finding the money. If I was you, I’d show some humbleness and be thankful for what I got.”

“The split’s always been fair, ain’t it?” Eddy said.

“If it ain’t been fair, I wouldn’t have no way of knowing, would I?” Andre said.

But Bertrand no longer cared if Andre believed him and Eddy or not. That house back there on the flooded alley was creaking with cash-ola. Ten more minutes with the ball-peen and the crowbar and he would have had the upstairs walls peeled down to the floor. Bertrand could see stacks of cash tumbling out on his shoe tops.

He looked at his watch. It was one in the morning. He and Eddy could be at the alley in less than a half hour, cut the engine, and hand-pull the boat in from the side street. Nobody would even know they were there. Because they already knew the layout they could probably work inside without flashlights. This was the big score, man. He’d done right by Andre and his nephew and it was time to get back into action. Screw this diplomacy shit.

“Me and Eddy are going back. Y’all stay here,” Bertrand said.

Andre pinched his abs, his eyes empty, his mouth pursed. “How come we get left behind?”

“Let me ax you a better question,” Bertrand said. “How come you always feeling yourself up?”

“Why don’t you lay off me, man? Case you ain’t noticed, the buses and the streetcar ain’t running,” Andre said. “We suppose to carry our loot t’rou town?”

“Andre’s right, man. One for all and all for one. We all going back together,” Eddy said. He lit a cigarette and blew out smoke without removing the cigarette from his lips. He looked at Andre’s nephew. “You up for that, my li’l brother?”

Kevin was seated on the floor, eating a fried pie, his springy hair bright with sweat. He wiped his mouth with his shirt. “I ain’t scared,” he said.

Bertrand wanted to shove Eddy’s head into a commode.

OTIS SLEPT THE sleep of the dead, his wife’s hip nestled against him, the attic fan drawing a breeze across their bodies. He dreamed of his parents and the tiny yellow house he had grown up in. In the spring the grass was always cool in the evening and full of clover, and when his father came home from work at the sawmill, they played a game of pitch-and-catch in the front yard. There were cows and horses in a field behind the house, and a big hackberry tree in the side yard that shaded the roof during the hottest hours of the day. Otis had always loved the house he had grown up in and he had loved his family and had always believed he was loved by them in return.

He believed this right up to the Indian-summer afternoon his father discovered his wife’s infidelity and shot her lover to death on the steps of the Baptist church where he served as pastor, then came home and was shot down and killed by a volunteer constable who had once been his fishing partner.

Otis sat straight up in bed. Then he went into the bathroom and tried to wash his face in the lavatory. The faucet made a loud, squeaking sound, and a pipe vibrated dryly in the wall.

“What was that?” Melanie said from the bed.

“It’s just me. I forgot the water was off.”

“I thought I heard something outside.”

He walked back into the bedroom, his bare feet padding on the carpet. All he could hear was the steady drone of the attic fan and the wind in the trees on the north side of the house. He looked out on the street. The moon had broken out of the clouds and created a black glaze on the surface of the floodwater. A solitary palm frond rustled against the side of a tree trunk on the neutral ground and a trash can turned in an eddy by a plugged storm drain.

“I had a bad dream. I was probably talking in my sleep,” he said.

“Are you sure no one is out there?”

“I never told you how my father died.”

She raised herself on her elbow, her face lined from the pillow. “I thought he had leukemia.”

“He did. But that’s not how he died. He was shot to death by a friend of his, a constable. He was going to kill my mother,” Otis said. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring into space, his back to his wife, when he said this.

The room was silent a long time. When he lay back down, Melanie took his hand in hers. “Otis?” she said, looking up into the darkness.

“Yes?”

“We mustn’t ever tell anyone about this. That is not what happened in your family.”

In the glow of moonlight through the window, her face looked as though it had been sculpted in alabaster.

“Say that again?” Otis asked.

“You’re a respected insurance executive in New Orleans. That’s what you will remain. That story you just told me has no application in our lives today.”

“Mel?” he began.

“Please. I’ve told you not to call me that, Otis. It’s not a lot to ask.”

Otis went downstairs to the den and lay down on a black leather couch, a cushion over his head, his ears ringing with a sound like wind in seashells.

BERTRAND COULDN’T give up his resentment toward Eddy all the way back to the house where he’d found the cash and dope and the.38 snub. Eddy loved playing the big shot, handing out favors to people, screwing a cigarette in his mouth, firing it up with a Zippo, snapping the lid back tight, like he was the dude in control. Except Eddy was being generous with what wasn’t his to be generous with, in this case the biggest score of their lives. Andre was sitting backward on the bow of the boat, like he was lookout man, scanning the horizon, some kind of commando about to take down osama bin Laden.

What a pair of jokers. Maybe it was time to cut both of them loose.

But the real reason for Bertrand’s resentment of Eddy and Andre had little to do with the score at the house and he knew it. Every time he looked into their faces he saw his own face, and what he saw there set his stomach on fire again.

Maybe he could get away from Andre and Eddy and start over somewhere else. Forget about what they had done when they were stoned. Yeah, maybe he could even make up for it, write those girls a note and mail it to the newspaper from another city. It hadn’t been his idea anyway. It was Eddy who always had a thing about young white girls, always saying sick stuff when they pulled up to them next to a red light. Andre had been a sex freak ever since he got turned out in the Lafourche Parish Prison. Bertrand never got off hurting people.

But no matter how many times Bertrand went over the assault on the two victims, he could not escape one conclusion about his participation: He had entered into it willingly, and when he saw revulsion in the face of the girl they had taken out of the car with the dead battery, he had done it to her with greater violence than either his brother or Andre.