The Tin Roof Blowdown Read online

  “Yeah, New Orleans cops that been wading in water up to their chins love to do that for guys who get their badges out of Cracker Jack boxes.”

  “I’m trying to be your friend, Bertrand. I want to make you rich. You’re inches away from having the most beautiful women in the world.”

  “Hey, man, no hard feelings, but I don’t think you know nothing about beautiful women.”

  Bertrand got up from the step and went back in the house. He wondered if he had managed to conceal the fact he had made Ronald as one of the men who had kidnapped Eddy. When he looked back through the screen, Ronald was turning his car around in the yard, one tire mashing over a tomato plant in his grandmother’s garden. The shape of his head reminded Bertrand of a question mark. Then Ronald’s eyes locked on Bertrand’s. The expression on Ronald’s face made Bertrand step back from the screen.

  A FEW MINUTES LATER Bertrand drove down to the grocery store in Loreauville and bought a chocolate drink from the soda machine. He drank it in the car, in the parking lot, across from a Catholic church, and tried to think. This dude with a head and face that reminded him of the curved head of a long-reach toothbrush was lying. He was one of the dudes who had grabbed and tortured Eddy. Which meant he was one of the dudes working for Sidney Kovick. But why didn’t they just grab Bertrand, too? They knew where he lived. They knew his movements. They knew who his grandmother was. Bertrand should have been dog food by now.

  Because the guy was working his own deal? Because the guy was going to stiff Sidney Kovick?

  That was it. Kovick’s hired geek had got off his leash and was going to make his own score, at Kovick’s expense.

  Maybe it was time to mess with a couple of people’s heads as well as set things straight with somebody who thinks it’s all right to pop other people in the face, Bertrand thought.

  He changed the last five dollars of the money his grandmother had given him into silver and used the pay phone on the front of the grocery store to call long-distance information. “Yeah, Kovick’s Flowers in Algiers, that’s it, you got it,” he said. “Snap it up, too, okay? This is an emergency situation.”

  He looked at his watch. It was 4:56. Come on, come on, he thought. “Hey, ain’t y’all heard of computers? What’s the holdup?” he danced up and down on the balls of his feet. “All right, say it again.” he wrote the number on the grocery store wall. “Tell your supervisor to give you a raise. Tell her Bertrand Melancon give her the green light on that.”

  He punched the number into the pay phone, his ulcers singing, his head light as a balloon with the adrenaline pumping through his system.

  Be there, be there, be there, he prayed, because he knew if he didn’t connect with Kovick now, his courage would wane and fail him later, as it always had.

  After the eighth ring, Bertrand almost gave up. Then someone picked up the receiver and said, “Kovick’s Flowers. Could I help you?”

  The voice at the other end of the connection made Bertrand’s bowels turn to water.

  “Could I help you?” the voice repeated.

  “No, you can help yourself, motherfucker.”

  There was a pause, more of fatigue than surprise. “Is this who I think it is?”

  “Yeah, Bertrand Melancon, the brother of Eddy Melancon, if that name mean anything to you. Know a cracker drives a blue Merc, looks like somebody beat on his face wit’ an ugly stick when he was a kid?”

  “No.”

  “Think hard. Carries a PI badge. Thinks the niggers are gonna start tap-dancing and spitting watermelon seeds when he rolls the gold on them?”

  “You seem to be a slow learner, kid. Why don’t you drop by and let’s have a talk?”

  “No, this time you listen to me. Your man was here with a fat envelope full of dead presidents. Guess what he was doing. Cutting his own deal for them blood stones and selling your sorry ass down the drain. Maybe you ought to hire a higher class of circus freaks to do your dirty work.”

  “Where can I get in touch with this guy?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. I called for another reason. Maybe I deserved what you done to me. Maybe I went there axing to get bitch-slapped and kicked in the ass in front of people. But I learned something there you ain’t gonna understand. I learned I ain’t no killer. I couldn’t cap you, no matter what you done to me and Eddy. So I come out of this wit’ something you didn’t figure on. I know I ain’t like you, a killer done cut off a man’s legs, and that’s worth more to me than them blood stones.”

  The line was silent.

  “You there?” Bertrand said.

  “Where are you?” the voice said.

  “In your head, just like you been in mine. But not no more,” Bertrand said, and hung up.

  Wow, he thought, his skin tingling like he’d just walked out of an igloo.

  Chapter 25

  THE WHITE FLICKER of lightning in the trees surrounding her house made Melanie Baylor think of the summer storms she had known as a child growing up north of Chicago. The family had lived on Lake Michigan, in a neighborhood of hardwood trees and elevated lawns and sailboats tacking in the wind against a background of azure water that seemed as large as the sea. The storms could tear at the lake’s surface and torment the trees, but the big two-story house she had lived in was a safe place, one where her father, a stockbroker, smoked a pipe in front of the fireplace and was always full of good cheer. Even during the winter, when the boathouse was locked up and the lake plated with ice, the house and the small town where they shopped were safe places, far from wars and urban unrest. Melanie knew she would marry and move away one day, perhaps to the East Coast, but she would always remain a midwesterner and her real home would always be located inside chestnut and beech and maple trees on the shores of Lake Michigan.

  That was before her father had a massive coronary in the bed of his mistress in Naperville. That was before the Securities and Exchange Commission investigated his brokerage service. That was before his creditors sued the estate and took every cent the family had, including the home on Lake Michigan.

  Melanie lifted the bottle of bourbon from the cupboard shelf and poured an inch into her glass. Then she poured again and got ice from the refrigerator and placed three cubes in the glass and added water. She could hear rain on the roof now and the trees in the backyard were wet and dark green when the lightning flickered in the clouds. Otis and Thelma were still at the grocery store in New Iberia. By Melanie’s estimate, the combination of bad weather and driving distance and the amount of groceries they had to buy ensured they would be gone for at least an hour and a half. She would enjoy her bourbon and her solitude until then, and perhaps fix one strong drink just before they arrived back home, and that would be it for the evening.

  She wasn’t an alcoholic. That’s what her first husband had been. One thing was for sure. She would never be like him. That was not up for debate.

  Otis didn’t take her to task because she had lost her abstemious ways, nor did he monitor the amount that was gone each day from the Chianti bottle in the pantry or the decanter of brandy in the dining room. Otis was a good man, she told herself with a degree of self-fondness, proud of the way she had come to accept him and his physical ways and the smell of testosterone his clothes sometimes carried.

  She showered and washed her hair and dried herself in front of the mirror. She turned sideways and raised herself slightly on her toes and looked at the flatness of her stomach, the firmness of her breasts, the sun-browned, almost tallowlike smoothness of her skin. She felt an imperious sexual urge that made her wet her lips and tilt back her head, creating an erotic self-image in her mind that made her wonder if indeed she wasn’t a narcissist. She bit down sensuously on her lower lip and removed a strand of hair from her eye. Then she slipped her feet into her sandals and, while she watched herself in the mirror, carefully blotted the drops of water off her cheeks and forehead.

  She picked up her drink from the top of the toilet tank and drank. Otis thought he kn
ew everything about her, but the reality was otherwise. Maybe she would give him a little lesson one of these nights. Her erotic power was far greater than he knew. The men who looked at her with an adventurous eye were never made to feel they were acting inappropriately. Maybe Otis should become a little more aware of the desire she could stir in others.

  She put on her fluffy robe and wrapped her head with a towel and took her drink into the living room. She turned the stereo to the University’s classical music station and opened a book on her knee and sipped from her glass. Outside, the rain was blowing in a vortex that looked like spun glass in the porch light. The two-lane road in front of the house was black and slick, and across the bayou she could see lights in a backyard and a Negro man on a ladder redistributing the bricks that held down the blue felt and canvas that covered a hole in his roof left by Rita.

  When would this bad weather end? When would all the problems wrought by the hurricanes just go away?

  A car leaking oil smoke went by the house and turned around by the drawbridge. A moment later the car’s headlights went out. Melanie set down her drink and book and went to the window, unconsciously closing her robe at the throat.

  The car was barely discernible in the darkness created by the overhang of the trees. She strained her eyes but could not tell if the driver was still inside or not. In the background, up on the drawbridge, a vehicle she never expected to see in a rural area of southern Louisiana suddenly appeared in the glow of the bridge’s overhead lights. A lavender Rolls-Royce clattered across the grid, turned by the plantation house next door, and headed down the bayou road, in the opposite direction from the parked car and the Baylor house.

  She checked the lock and chain on the front door and lowered the blinds. Then she sat quietly in her chair and finished her drink. The bourbon went down into her stomach like an old friend, in a way that made her feel warm and confident and erotically empowered at the same time. Then it spread throughout her body and deadened all her nerve endings, like someone closing her eyes with his fingers, like someone whispering in her ear that the world was a safe and good place and that one’s mistakes would be healed by the anodyne of time.

  What better friend could one have?

  BERTRAND MELANCON finished writing his letter of amends to the Baylor family and read through it one more time. He wondered if they would be bothered by the fact it was written on a paper towel. More important, he wondered if they would be repelled by his visitation at their home. But rain or shine, it was time to boogie down the bayou. He drank from the bottle of chocolate milk his grandmother had bought for his stomach, folded the paper towel with a neat crease, and stuck it inside his shirt.

  Rain swept in sheets across the Loreauville Quarters and the cane fields and pecan trees and danced in a yellow mist on the bayou’s surface. He ran through his grandmother’s flooded yard and started her car, feeding it the gas, waiting for the spark plugs in all the cylinders to get hot enough to run in sync so the engine would stop backfiring and belching clouds of smoke out of the broken muffler.

  He drove onto the state road and headed toward New Iberia, the rain beating so hard on his roof and windows, the rubber on his windshield wipers was coming off. As he turned onto Old Jeanerette Road and followed the bayou toward the Baylors’ house, he discovered he had another problem as well: the brakes were not responding until the pedal was almost to the floor.

  His grandmother had said something about low brake fluid earlier, but he had been working on his letter of amends and hadn’t paid attention to her. Now he was in the midst of another rainstorm with a defective brake system and layers of oil smoke rising up his nose. How much else could go wrong?

  He pumped the pedal and felt the resistance level firm up, but a moment later it went soft again and he almost drove through the stop sign at the four-corners in a rural slum by the bayou. There were self-serve gas pumps at the convenience store on the highway, across the bridge, but it was doubtful he could buy brake fluid there. So he pushed on toward Jeanerette and the Baylors’ house, the rain sluicing down his windshield, his ulcers blaring like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

  Finally he passed Alice Plantation and saw the lights of the Jeanerette drawbridge glowing in the mist. He passed the Baylors’ house and made a U-turn at the bridge and parked in the shadows of trees. The rain had turned to fog and a soft drizzle that seemed to adhere to every surface in sight. The gallery light was on at the Baylor house, and so were the lights in the living room and the kitchen. Maybe the whole family was there. Briefly he saw a silhouette at a window, just before somebody dropped the blinds.

  Bertrand had always wondered how paratroopers mustered the courage to jump out of airplanes. What kind of fool would leap out a door thousands of feet above the earth, hoping a bunch of cloth streaming out of his back didn’t shred into rags, hoping he wasn’t going to become a keyhole in a barn roof? In the St. John the Baptist jail he got the chance to ask a paratrooper just that question.

  The paratrooper picked at his nails and said, “You just don’t think about it before you do it and you don’t think about it after it’s over.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah, more or less,” the paratrooper replied.

  Bertrand tried to use the paratrooper’s words to muster the courage he needed to approach Thelma Baylor’s home. But they were of no help to him and he wondered if in fact there were certain words you never adequately understood until you had earned the right to understand them.

  He took a breath and headed for the Baylors’ front door, his letter of amends still inside his shirt. Behind him, he heard a heavy vehicle clatter across the drawbridge’s grid. He turned and saw a luxurious lavender automobile of a kind he had never seen before. The chrome radiator cap was on the outside of the hood. The bodywork was so smooth it looked like plastic that had been poured into a mold. Then the automobile disappeared down the back road toward the ragged outline of the old sugar mill.

  Bertrand walked across the Baylors’ front yard and mounted the steps. He hesitated a moment, then he pulled open the screen door and went inside.

  MELANIE HEARD THE rain slacken, then become nothing more than a whisper of tree branches across the tin surface of her roof. The side yard was strung with fog, the sky still flickering with electricity that made no sound. She had poured her glass half full of bourbon and had added more ice but no water. When she drank from the glass, the bourbon was cold enough and strong enough to anesthetize everything it touched. It was particularly effective in preempting or editing images from the night Katrina had made landfall and changed her life forever.

  She thought she felt a vibration caused by footsteps on the gallery. But the footsteps couldn’t belong to Thelma or Otis, could they? Melanie would have seen the headlights in the driveway. Besides, Thelma and Otis always unloaded the groceries under the porte cochere and entered the house through the side door, just as they had in New Orleans.

  She set down her book and listened. Then any doubts she had about the presence of someone on the gallery were removed by a sharp knock. She got up and approached the door at an angle, so she could see through one of the warped panes at the top without being seen by the person outside.

  Suddenly she was looking at the profile of a black man. He was of medium height, unshaved, his hair uncut, his face beaded with moisture. He kept looking back at the road, where a vehicle’s headlights were burning on the road’s shoulder. Then the headlights went out and the young black man turned back toward the door.

  Melanie stepped back quickly. The whiskey that had nestled in every corner of her system, warming and comforting her, seemed to evaporate like water on an overheated woodstove. Her hands trembled and her breath caught in her throat. She went to the kitchen and punched in 911, then realized there would not be time for the police to get there. She would have to deal with the black man herself, either by confronting or ignoring him.

  But if she ignored him, he would assume no one was home and perhap
s break in. She closed her eyes and thought she heard a gunshot, then realized the sound was not real, that the whiskey had betrayed her and was now re-creating and amplifying memories it was supposed to protect her from.

  She heard the voice of a black woman speaking from the phone receiver: “What is the nature of your emergency?”

  “What did you say?” Melanie asked.

  “What is the nature of your emergency?”

  “A man is at my door. Send someone out.”

  “Is he breaking in?”

  “He’s a black man. I don’t know who he is. He has no business here.”

  “We’ll send someone out, ma’am. Is there someone else at your house?”

  “No, you won’t send somebody out. You’ll give priority to auto accidents. I know you people.”

  “What do you mean by ‘you people,’ ma’am? Do you need medical assistance? You sound like you’ve been drinking.”

  “No, I don’t need medical assistance, you ignorant thing,” Melanie said. She dropped the receiver on the table, rejecting the dispatcher but not breaking the connection.

  She pulled a butcher knife from one of the slits in the wood block where she kept all her sharpest knives. Then she went back to the front door and flung it open, the butcher knife concealed behind her.

  The black man stood in front of her, clutching a flattened brown paper towel in both hands, like someone who had come Christmas caroling.

  “Are you miz Baylor?” he asked.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “Is Miss Thelma or Mr. Baylor here?”

  “I asked you what you want.”

  “So I guess they ain’t here. Let me read this to you, ma’am, then I’m gone.”

  He positioned himself so the overhead light fell on the paper towel.

  “Are you crazy?” she said.

  “‘To Miss Thelma and the family of Miss Thelma,’” he read. “‘I am sorry for what I have did to her. I wasn’t always that kind of person. Or maybe I was. I am not sure. But I want to make it right even though I know it is not going to ever be right with her or anybody who was hurt like she been hurt.