James Burke - The Tin Roof Blowdown

Jimmy Flannigan and Clete’s other friends from the bar pick him up and clean the glass off his clothes and touch him all over like he’s a piece of bruised fruit, amazed that their friend is still alive. Someone even calls 911 and discovers that every cop and emergency vehicle in Orleans Parish is already overloaded with obligations far beyond their capacity. Clete stands dazed and chagrined in the middle of the street, unable to accept the fact he just got taken down by three dirtbags who couldn’t clean bubble gum off their shoes without a diagram.

He tells his friends to go back inside the bar, then opens the door to the cottage. Inside, a boy not more than seventeen is sitting on the floor, watching a cartoon on a television set, a paper bag packed with clothes resting by his foot. The volume on the television is deafening. “Turn that off,” Clete says.

The boy does as he is told. He wears the stylized baggy pants and oversized T-shirt of a gangbanger, but his clothes look fresh from the box and his body is so thin it could be made of sticks.

“Where are your folks?” Clete asks.

“My auntie already lined up at the ’Dome to get us cots. My Uncle Andre is taking me there in a li’l bit,” the boy replies. “Everybody suppose to bring food for five days. That’s what they say.”

“Andre Rochon is your uncle?”

“Yes, suh.”

“What’s your name?”

“Kevin Rochon.”

“Your uncle had to take off somewhere. If you’re going to the Superdome, you’ll have to walk.”

“It ain’t no big deal,” the boy says, and refocuses his attention on the cartoon.

Right, Clete says to himself.

He goes back to the bar and dispenses with Scotch and milk and orders a frosted mug of beer and three shot glasses brimming with Beam. Within an hour, he’s as drunk as everyone else in the building, safe inside the sweaty ambiance of jukebox music and manufactured good cheer. His face is oily and hot, his head ringing with nonexistent sounds that are generated by armored vehicles and helicopter blades. Two stranded UCLA co-eds are dancing on the bar, one of them toking on a joint she holds to her lips with roach clips. Jimmy Flannigan fits his hand around the pitted back of Clete’s neck and squeezes, as though grasping a fire hydrant. “I just come back from the Superdome. You ought to see the lines. Everybody from the Iberville Project is trying to pack in there,” he says.

“Yeah?” Clete replies, unsure of the point.

“Why they sending everybody from the projects to the ’Dome?” Jimmy asks.

“It has stadium seating,” Clete says.

“So why do people from the projects got to have stadium seating?”

“When Lake Pontchartrain covers the city, maybe some of the poor bastards can find an air pocket under the roof and not drown,” he says.

ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON in New Iberia, the clouds are gray, the leaves of the live oaks along Main Street riffling with an occasional gust of wind. The end of summer has arrived with a smell of dust and distant rain and smoke from meatfires across the bayou in City Park but with no hint that south of us a churning white vortex of wind and water so great in magnitude that only a satellite photograph can do it justice is grinding its way toward the Louisiana-Mississippi coast.

As I watch the progress of the storm on the television set I feel like a witness to a holocaust in the making. For two days, the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, has been pleading for help to anyone who will listen. A state emergency official in Metairie has become emotionally undone during an CNN interview, waving his arms, his face blotched like a man coming off a drunk. He states unequivocally that sixty-two thousand people will die if the storm maintains its current category 5 strength and hits New Orleans head-on.

My adopted daughter, Alafair, just out of Reed College, answers the telephone in the kitchen. I hope the call is from Clete Purcel, agreeing to evacuate from New Orleans and stay at our house. It’s not. The call is from the sheriff of Iberia Parish, Helen Soileau, who has other concerns.

“We just busted Herman Stanga,” she says. “We got his meth lab and nailed two of his mules.”

“You know how many times we’ve busted Herman Stanga?”

“That’s why I want you to supervise the case, Pops. This time we bury him.”

“Dealing with Herman Stanga is like picking up dog feces with your hands. Get someone else, Helen.”

“The mules are of more interest to me right now than Stanga. I’ve got both of them in lockup.”

“What’s interesting about people who have minus signs in front of their IQs?

“Come on down, check it out.”

THE BARRED CELL has no windows and smells of the disinfectant that has been used to scrub all its steel and concrete surfaces. The two men locked inside have taken off their shirts and their shoes and are doing push-ups with their feet propped on a wood bench. Their arms and plated chests are blue with Gothic-letter tats. Their armpits are shaved, their lats as hard-looking as the sides of coopered barrels, tapering into twenty-eight-inch waists and stomachs that are flat from the sternum to the groin. With each pushup, a network of ten-dons blooms against the tautness of their skin. They have the hands of bricklayers or men who scrub swimming pools clean with muriatic acid or cut and fashion stone in subfreezing weather. The power in their bodies makes you think of a tightly wound steel spring, aching for release, waiting for the slightest of external triggers.

One of them stops his exercise routine, sits on the bench, and breathes in and out through his nose, indifferent to the fact that Helen and I are only two feet from him, watching him as we would an animal at a zoo.

“I dig your tats. Are y’all Eighteenth Streeters?” I say.

He grins and makes no reply. His hair is cut high and tight, his scalp notched with scars.

“Latin Kings?” I ask.

“Who?” he says.

“How about Mara Salvatrucha?” I say.

He pauses before he replies, his fingers splaying stiffly on his knees, the soles of his shoes clicking playfully on the floor. “Why you think that, man?” he asks.

“The ‘MS’ tattooed on one eyelid and the ‘13’ on the other were clues,” I say.

“You nailed me, man,” he says. He looks up into my face, grinning. But the black luster in his eyes is the kind that makes one swallow, not smile in return.

“I thought you guys were out on the West Coast or creating new opportunities in northern Virginia,” I say.

His eyes are fixed straight ahead, as though he can see meaning inside the cell’s shadows. Or perhaps he’s staring at images inside his own head, remembering deeds that are testimony to the theory that not all of us descend from the same tree. He bobbles his head back and forth on his shoulders, working out a kink, a prizefighter in the corner awaiting the first-round bell. “When’s chow?” he says.

“The caterer will be here at six,” Helen says.

The other man gets off the floor and begins touching his toes, a neat crease folding across his navel, his narrow buttocks turned toward us. I glance at the computer printouts attached to the clipboard in my hand. “Your street name is Chula?” I say to the man sitting on the bench.

“Yeah, man, you got it.”

“What’s your name mean?” I ask.

“‘Put it away,’ man. Like at jai alai? Before the guy slams the ball into the wall, everybody shouts out, ‘Chula! Put it away.’”

“Y’all got impressive sheets. Lewisburg, Pelican Island, Marion,” I say. “Why fool with a small-town pimp like Herman Stanga?”

“The black dude? We just stopped and asked for directions. Then cops was all over us,” the seated man says.