James Burke - The Tin Roof Blowdown

“What is it? Why do I make you angry?” he says.

She seems to teeter on a direct answer to his question, her eyes charged with light. Then the moment passes. “I’m not angry. I just don’t think it’s good for Thelma to stay in her room all the time. Maybe she should think about getting a job,” she says.

But secretly Otis has always suspected that his wife is like many Northerners. She likes people of color collectively and as an abstraction. But she doesn’t feel comfortable with them individually. It’s been obvious from the night of the attack that she doesn’t want her friends to know her stepdaughter has been the victim of black rapists.

“You think I let Thelma down somehow?” he asks.

She examines her hands over the sink, feeling the bones in them, the joints of her fingers. She has begun to complain of arthritis, although she has not seen a doctor for at least a year. She looks at the rain beating on the philodendron and the banana trees and windmill palms in the side yard.

“Why did you let her go to the prom with an idiot who doesn’t know how to wash the dandruff out of his hair, much less protect his date from a bunch of animals?” she says.

“You never made any mistakes when you were that age?” he replies.

“Of that magnitude? No, I had to wait until I was a mature woman to do that,” she says.

He slings his workout bag over his shoulder and goes down the covered walk to the carriage house and backs his car under the canopy of oaks and into the street, knocking the trash can into the hedge. Melanie’s last statement to him is one he knows he will never be able to scrub out of his memory, no matter what form of amends or atonement, if any, she ever tries to make.

That thought is like a cold vapor wrapped around his heart, and briefly the avenue and windswept neutral ground and the scrolled purple and pink neon tubing on the corner drugstore go out of focus.

THE HEALTH CLUB is almost empty, the basketball court echoing with the sounds of a solitary shooter bouncing shots off a steel rim. The shooter is Otis’s neighbor, Tom Claggart, an export-import man who flies in a private plane with business friends to western game farms, where they shoot animals that are released from either cages or penned areas shortly before the hunters’ arrival. Tom has told Otis, with a lascivious wink, that he and his friends also land at a private airstrip not far from a brothel outside Vegas.

“Got her battened down?” he says, the basketball grasped between his palms.

“Pretty much,” Otis says.

Tom’s torso is as solid as a cypress stump, his head bullet-shaped. Each week a barber clips his mustache, which is threaded with white, and lathers his scalp and shaves it with a straight-edged razor.

“I think after landfall we’re gonna have monkey shit flying through the fan,” Tom says.

“I don’t know as I follow you,” Otis replies.

“The black Irish get restive after natural disasters.” Tom is smiling now, as though the two of them share a private knowledge.

“I guess we’ll find out,” Otis replies.

Tom flings his basketball down the court and watches it bounce and roll across the maple boards into the shadows. The windows high up on the walls are streaked with rain, whipped by the branches of trees. His face becomes thoughtful. “I’ve never talked to you about this before, but my sister-in-law told me what happened to your daughter. They ever catch those guys?”

“Not yet.”

“That’s a shame. If they didn’t catch them by now, they probably won’t.”

“I couldn’t say,” Otis replies.

“You own a gun?”

“Why?”

“Come Monday, those bastards are gonna be swarming all over the neighborhood. If I were you, I’d stop jerking on my dork and smell the coffee.”

“What makes you think you can talk to me like that?”

“Just speaking to you as a neighbor and a friend.”

“Don’t.”

“This isn’t like you, Otis.”

That’s what you think, you idiot, Otis says to himself, and is surprised by the virulence of his own thoughts.

IT’S SATURDAY EVENING and long lines of automobiles are streaming out of New Orleans, northbound on Interstate 10, although rumors have already spread that there is not a motel room available all the way to St. Louis, Missouri.

But for the glad of heart, life goes on full-throttle in the French Quarter. In a corner bar off Ursulines, one in which Christmas lights never come down, Clete Purcel has positioned himself at a window so he can watch a shuttered cottage across the street, in front of which a black male is smoking a cigarette in an illegally parked panel truck. The rain has stopped and the air is unnaturally green and contains the dense, heavy odor of the Gulf. There is even a rip of bone-white light in the clouds, as though the evening sunset is about to resume. The black male in the panel truck is talking on a cell phone and blowing his cigarette smoke out the window, where it seems to hang in the air like damp cotton. Then he twists his head and stares at the bar, and for a moment Clete thinks he has been made.

But the black man is watching a woman in spiked heels and skintight shorts walking rapidly down the sidewalk, her sequined, fringed purse swinging back on her rump. The owner of the bar is opening all the doors, filling the interior with a bloom of fresh air that smells of brine and wet trees. The revelers inside react as though a bad moment in their lives has come and gone.

“You want another drink? It’s on the house,” the owner says.

“I look like I can’t pay for my drinks?” Clete says.

“No, you look like you got the heebie-jeebies. Maybe you ought to get yourself laid.”

Clete gives the owner a look, one that makes the owner’s eyes shift off Clete’s face. The owner is Jimmy Flannigan, an ex-professional wrestler who now wears earrings and has a full-body wax done at a parlor on Airline Highway.

“So don’t get laid. But you’re making my customers nervous. No one likes to get stepped on by out-of-control circus elephants.”

Clete has long ago given up contending with Jimmy’s insults. “I got news for you. The Apocalypse could blow through this dump and your clientele wouldn’t notice,” he says.

Jimmy pours into Clete’s glass from a Scotch bottle with a chrome nipple on it. The Scotch swirls inside the milk like marbled ice cream. “What’s eatin’ you, Purcel? Just off your feed?” he says.

Clete drinks his glass half empty. “Something like that,” he says.

How can he explain to Jimmy Flannigan the sense of apprehension and the déjà vu that dries out his mouth and causes his scalp to tighten against his skull? Or describe helicopters lifting off a rooftop into a sky ribbed with strips of blood-red cloud while Mobs of terrified Vietnamese civilians fight with one another and plead with United States Marines to let them on board? You learn it soon or you learn it late: There are some kinds of experience you never share with anyone, not even with people who have had their ticket punched by the same conductor you have.

Clete returns to the window and tries to concentrate on the black man parked across the street. The black man is Andre Rochon, a twenty-three-year-old bail skip whose forfeited bond is less consequential than the information he can provide on two other bail skips who are into Clete’s employers, Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine, for thirty large.

Two drinks later the scene has not changed. And neither has the knot of anxiety in Clete’s stomach or the band of tension that keeps tightening like a strand of piano wire wrapped around his head.

Clete is convinced he’s watching a meth drop in the making. The two other players are the Melancon brothers, full-time wiseasses with busts on both their sheets for strong-arm robbery, illegal possession of firearms, and intimidation of witnesses. Clete suspects that one or both of the Melancon brothers is about to show up at the shuttered cottage.