James Burke - The Tin Roof Blowdown

Natalia brings him his coffee and warm milk and a single powdered beignet from the Café du Monde on a tray. She draws the blinds, turns the electric fan on him, and asks, “You want me to do it for you?”

“No, I don’t need it right now. I’ll wait until later in the day.”

“I don’t think you got no sleep last night.”

He watches the rainwater feathering off the roof and makes no reply. When he sits up on the rollaway bed, tentacles of light wrap around his thighs and probe his groin. Natalia sits down beside him, her dress dropping into a loop between her knees. Her hair is black and thick and she washes it often so it always has a sheen in it, and when she takes it down on her shoulders she is truly lovely to look at. She doesn’t smoke or drink, and there’s never a hint of the life she leads in her clothes or on her skin, not unless you include the tracks inside her thighs.

Her face is lost in thought, either about him or herself, he’s not sure. To her, Jude LeBlanc is a mystery, one she never quite understands, but it’s obvious she accepts and loves him for whatever he is or isn’t and imposes no judgment upon him.

“Can I do something else for you?”

“Like what?”

“Sometimes I feel I don’t ever do you no good, that I can’t give you nothing,” she says.

“You fixed breakfast for me,” he says.

She changes her position and kneels behind him on the rollaway, rubbing his shoulders, clutching him briefly to her, resting her cheek against the back of his head. “They got drugs in Mexico the pharmaceutical companies don’t allow on the market here,” she says.

“You’re my cure,” he replies.

She holds him, and for just a moment he wants to release all the desperation and hopelessness and unrelieved sense of loss that have characterized his life. But how do you explain to others that a false Gleason score on a prostate biopsy can result in so much damage to a person’s life? Most people don’t even understand the terminology. Plus he does not wish to rob others of their faith in the exactitude of medical science. To do so is, in a way, the same as robbing them of the only belief system they have.

The Gleason scale had indicated that the cancer had not spread outside the prostate. As a consequence the surgeon had elected not to take out the erectile nerve. The positive margins left behind went into the lymph nodes and the seminal vessels.

Natalia flattens herself against him, pressing her loins tightly into his back, and he feels desires stirring in him that he tries not to recognize, perhaps secretly hoping they will preempt the problems of conscience that prevent him from ever escaping his own loneliness.

He gets up from the rollaway, trying to hide his erection as he puts on his trousers. His Roman collar has fallen off the nightstand and a tangle of animal hair and floor dirt has stuck to the bottom rim. He goes to the sink and tries to clean it, rubbing the smudge deeper into the collar’s whiteness, splashing it with grease from an unwashed pot. He leans heavily on his hands, his sense of futility more than he can hide.

Outside, the velocity of the wind is fanning the rain off the roof in sheets. A flowerpot topples from the balcony and bursts on the bricks below. Across the courtyard, a neighbor’s ventilated wood shutters rattle like tack hammers on their hinges.

“You going to the Ninth Ward today?” Natalia asks.

“It’s the only place that will have me,” he replies.

“Stay with me,” she says.

“Are you afraid of the storm?” he asks.

“I’m afraid for you. You need to be here, with me. You can’t be without your medicine.”

She calls it his “medicine” to protect his feelings, even though she knows he’s been arrested twice with stolen prescription forms and once with morphine from an actual heist, that in reality he is no different from her or any other junkie in the Quarter. The irony is that a peasant woman from the Third World, one who works as a prostitute to fuel her own addiction, has a spiritual love and respect for him that few in his own society would be willing to grant.

He feels a sudden tenderness for her that makes his loins turn to water. He puts his mouth on hers, then goes out into the rain, a newspaper over his head, and catches one of the few buses still running down to the lower end of the Ninth Ward.

OTIS BAYLOR PROUDLY calls himself a North Alabama transplant who is at home anyplace in the world, New Orleans or New Iberia or wherever his insurance company cares to send him. He’s effusive in manner, generous in his giving, and devoted to his family. If at all possible, he refuses to judge others and to be marked by the prejudices of either his contemporaries or the people of his piney-woods birthplace, where as a boy he witnessed his father and uncle attend cross lightings in full Klan regalia.

In fact, Otis learned the insurance business from the bottom up, working a debit route in the Negro and blue-collar neighborhoods of Birmingham. Where other salesmen had failed, Otis was a shining success. At a convention of salespeople in Mobile, a cynical rival asked him his secret. “Treat folks with respect and you’ll be amazed at how they respond,” Otis answered.

Today he drives home early in rain and heavy traffic, telling himself that neither he nor his family will be undone by the forces of nature. His house was built in 1856 and was mute witness to Yankee occupation, epidemics of yellow jack, street battles between Union loyalists and White Leaguers, the lynching of Italian immigrants from streetlamps, and tidal surges that left the bodies of drowned clipper ship sailors hanging in trees. The men who built Otis’s house had built it right, and with the gasoline-powered generators he has placed in his carriage house, the flashlights and medical supplies and canned food and bottled water he has packed into his pantries and his attic, he is confident he and his family can persevere through the worst of natural calamities.

Have faith in God, but also have faith in yourself. That’s what Otis’s daddy always said.

But as he stares at the rain sweeping through the live oak trees in his yard, another kind of fear flickers inside him, one that to him is even more unsettling than the prospect of the hurricane that is churning toward the city, sucking the Gulf of Mexico into its maw.

Otis has always believed in the work ethic and taking care of one’s self and one’s own. In his view, there is no such thing as luck, either good or bad. He believes that victimhood has become a self-sustaining culture, one to which he will never subscribe. When people fall on bad times, it’s usually the result of their own actions, he tells himself. The serpent didn’t force Eve to pick forbidden fruit, nor did God make Cain slay his brother.

But if Otis’s view is correct, why did undeserved suffering come in such a brutal fashion to his homely, sad, overweight daughter, his only child, whose self-esteem was so low she was overjoyed to be invited to the senior prom by a rail of a boy with dandruff on his shoulders and glasses that made his eyes look like a goldfish’s?

After the prom, Thelma and her date had headed up Interstate 10 to a party, except the boy, who had moved to New Orleans only two months earlier, got lost and drove them into a neighborhood not far from the Desire Welfare Project. Mindlessly, the boy killed the engine and asked directions of a passerby. When he discovered his battery was dead and he couldn’t restart the engine, he walked to a pay phone to call Otis, leaving Thelma by herself.

The three black thugs who stumbled across her were probably ripped on weed and fortified wine. But that alone would not explain the ferocity of their attack on Otis’s daughter. They stuffed a red bandana in her mouth and twisted her arms behind her while they forced her between two buildings. Then they took turns raping and sodomizing her while they burned her skin with cigarettes.