James Burke - The Tin Roof Blowdown

“Yeah, mistakes like that can happen,” I reply. “But here’s the deal, Chula. We’ve got a hurricane blowing in and we don’t have time for bullshit from out-of-town guys who haven’t paid any local dues. See, Louisiana is not a state, it’s a Third World country. That means we really get pissed off when outsiders come in and think they can wipe their feet on us. You guys are mainline, so I won’t try to take you over the hurdles. Stacking time at Angola can be a real bitch, particularly if we decide to send you up with a bad jacket. If you want to take the bounce for Herman Stanga, be our guest. But you either get out in front of this or we’ll crush your cookie bag.”

The man who has been touching his toes stops and faces me. “Watch this, man,” he says.

He leaps against the wall with one foot and does a complete somersault, in a wink returning to an upright position. “What you think about that? Learned it in El Sal from the guys who killed my whole family and took turns raping me before they sold me to a carnival. Come on, man, tell me what you think about that.”

“To be honest, I think you should have stayed with the carnival,” I reply.

The remark isn’t intended to sink the hook in. But inadvertently that is what happens. Just when Helen and I are almost out of the corridor, the man street-named Chula rakes a tin cup back and forth on the bars. “Hey, you, the guy with the maricona, my sister is fucking a junkie priest from New Iberia. You say we ain’t paid no dues here? That ain’t local dues, man?”

Helen returns to the cell door, her arms pumped. “What did you call me?” she says.

Chula shrugs and smiles self-effacingly. “It don’t mean nothing against you. Your friend there shouldn’t have made fun about somebody being sold to a carnival,” he says. He leans against the wall, detaching from the world around him, his face striped with the bars’ shadows.

BACK HOME, I try to forget the two men in the holding cell. Molly, my wife, is a former nun and once worked with the Maryknolls in Central America. She has freckles on her shoulders and dark red hair that is thick and clipped short on her neck. She and Alafair are picking up the garden tools in the backyard and locking them in a tin shed behind the porte cochere. The air is breathless, cool, rain-scented, the live oak and pecan trees and the bayou as still as images in a painting. “Did Clete call?” I ask.

“No, but I called him. He’s not going to evacuate,” Molly says. She studies my face. She knows I’m not thinking about Clete. “Did something happen at the jail?”

“A local priest named Jude LeBlanc fell through a hole in the dimension about a year ago. He has terminal cancer and a morphine addiction and three or four warrants out for his arrest.”

The truth is, I don’t want to talk about it. If age brings wisdom, it lies in the realization that most talk is useless and that you stay out of other people’s grief.

“What’s that have to do with the jail?” Molly asks.

“A member of an El salvadoran gang called MS-13 said his sister was in the sack with Jude.”

“Did you ask him where your friend was?”

“You never empower the perps, no matter how many aces they’re holding,” I say.

A hard gust of wind blows down the long corridor of trees that line Bayou Teche, wrinkling the water like old skin, filling the air with the smell of fish roe and leaves that have turned yellow and black in the shade. Katrina will make landfall somewhere around Lake Pontchartrain in the next seven hours.

“Let’s fix supper,” she says.

“I don’t have much of an appetite,” I say.

Her face looks dry and empty, her cheeks slightly sunken. She lets out her breath. “God, those poor people,” she says.

HURRICANES DO NOT lend themselves to description, no more than do the pyrotechnics of a B-52 raid at ground zero. I have seen the survivors of the latter. Their grief is of a kind you never want to witness. They weep and make mewing sounds. Any words they speak are usually unintelligible. I have always suspected they have joined a group the Bible refers to as Heaven’s prisoners, anointed in a fashion most of us would resist even if we recognized God’s finger reaching out to touch our brow.

A category 5 hurricane carries an explosive force several times greater than that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. But unlike a man-made weapon of mass destruction, a hurricane creates an environment that preempts our natural laws. Early on the air turns a chemical green and contains a density that you can hold in your palm. The lightning and the thunder arrive almost like predictable friends, then fade into the ether and seem to become little more than a summer squall. Rain rings chain the swells between the whitecaps and the wind smells of salt spray and hard-packed sand that has warmed under the sun. You wonder if all the preparedness and alarm hasn’t been much ado about nothing.

Then the tide seems to shrink from the land, as though a giant drainhole has formed in the center of the Gulf. Palm trees straighten in the stillness, their fronds suddenly lifeless. You swallow to stop the popping sound in your ears, with the same sense of impotence you might experience aboard a plane that is dramatically losing altitude. To the south, a long black hump begins to gather itself on the earth’s rim, swelling out of the water like an enormous whale, extending itself all across the horizon. You cannot believe what you are watching. The black hump is now rushing toward the coastline, gaining momentum and size, increasing in velocity so rapidly that its own crest is absorbed by the wave before it can crash to the surface in front of it.

It’s called a tidal surge. Its force can turn a levee system into serpentine lines of black sand or level a city, particularly when the city has no natural barriers. The barrier islands off the Louisiana coast have long ago eroded away or been dredged up and heaped on barges and sold for shale parking lots. The petrochemical companies have cut roughly ten thousand miles of channels through the wetlands, allowing saline intrusion to poison and kill freshwater marsh areas from Plaquemines Parish to Sabine Pass. The levees along the Mississippi River shotgun hundreds of tons of mud over the edge of the continental shelf, preventing it from flowing westward along the coastline, where it is needed the most. Louisiana ’s wetlands continue to disappear at a rate of forty-seven square miles a year.

It’s 1:00 a.m. and I can hear the wind in the oaks and pecan trees. The ventilated shutters on our house are latched, vibrating slightly against the jambs. The only sign of a weather disturbance is a flicker of lightning in the clouds or a sudden gust of rain that patterns our tin roof with pine needles. Two hours to the east of us the people of New Orleans who have not evacuated are watching their city ripped off the face of the earth. Why is one group spared and one group not? I don’t have an answer. But I am determined that two newly arrived members of our community will not enjoy the safety of our jail, at least on their terms, while decent people are drowned in their own homes.

I call the night jailer and tell him to separate the two MS-13 members.

“What if they ax me why?” he says.

“Tell them we have a policy against homosexuals sharing the same cell in Iberia Parish,” I reply.

“Tell them what?”

A half hour later I drive to my office and read again through the faxes and computer printouts on the two MS-13 members. There are always dials on the perps. It’s just a matter of finding them. The perps might be con-wise and they may have the cunning of animals, but when it comes to successfully confronting the system, they’re charging uphill into a howitzer.