The Tin Roof Blowdown Read online

  “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.

  I check my firearm at the entrance to the lockup area and ask the night jailer to bring Felix “Chula” Ramos to the interrogation room. When Chula arrives, his body is clinking with waist and leg chains. He is wearing only a pair of white boxer undershorts and they look strangely innocuous against his tattooed skin.

  “Lose the restraints, Cap?”

  The night jailer is old and has gin roses in his face. He is not interested in either the thespian behavior of others or saving them from themselves. “Holler on the gate,” he says.

  Chula sits at the government-surplus metal table and takes my inventory, one hand relaxed on the tabletop. “I could rip out your throat. Before you could even beg, that fast,” he says, snapping his fingers.

  I pinch the fatigue out of my eyes. “Your fall partner, what’s-his-name, Luis, is an ignoramus, but I think you’re even dumber than he is.”

  The skin twitches under Chula’s left eye, as though an insect is walking across it. “Say that again?”

  “You guys dissed me and the sheriff because you have outstanding federal warrants on you and you thought you’d be blowing Bumfuck for an upscale federal facility. It’s not going to happen.”

  “You’re sending us to ’Gola, you’re saying?”

  “Eventually, but right now we’re transferring you to Central Lockup in New Orleans. Notice I said ‘you,’ not ‘you all.’ Orleans Parish has warrants on both you guys. It’s chickenshit stuff, but we’ll be honoring the protocol and shipping you off before dawn.”

  “The whole City is getting blown off the map. Who you kidding, man?”

  “With luck the prisoners at Central Lockup won’t be deserted by the personnel. But who knows? The salaries of civil servants in Orleans Parish suck. Can you tread water in a flooded room full of other guys doing the same thing?”

  “That ain’t funny, man.”

  “The sheriff and I had a big laugh about y’all’s jackets. Your fall partner boosted a bank in Pennsylvania, but a dye marker exploded in the bag and queered all the bills. So your idiot of a friend took seventy-five thousand dollars in hot money to a coin laundry and washed the bills over and over until they were pink. Then he tried to buy a forty-thousand-dollar SUV with them. This lamebrain not only outsmarted you, he cluster-fucked you six ways from breakfast. You’re going to do double nickels at Angola, half of it for him. If you think I’m lying, call me after you go into lockdown with the Big Stripes. Know what the Midnight Special is up there? Think of a sweaty three-hundred-pound black dude driving a freight train up your ass.”

  I wink at him. He stares at the opaque whiteness of the door, a shadow-filled crease forming across his brow. I can hear him breathing in the silence. A bolt of lightning crashes outside and the lights in the building flicker momentarily. “What you want, man?”

  “You said you
r sister was in the sack with a junkie priest.”

  Chapter 6

  BY MIDMORNING NEWSCASTERS all over the country were announcing that Hurricane Katrina had changed direction and had dropped from a category 5 storm to a category 3 just before making landfall, devastating Gulfport but sparing the city that care forgot.

  New Iberia ’s streets were clogged with traffic, as were those of every other town and city in southwest Louisiana, the Wal-Mart parking lot a coordination center for fundamentalist churches that unhesitatingly threw open their doors to anyone in need of help. But the sun was shining, the wind flecked with rain, the flowers blooming along East Main, more like spring than summer. We all took a breath, secure in our belief that we had faced the worst and that the warnings of the doomsayers had been undone by our collective faith.

  But the newscasters were wrong and so were we. New Orleans ’s long night of the soul was just beginning.

  During the night hurricane-force winds and a tidal surge had driven oceanic amounts of water up the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, nicknamed the “Mr. Go” canal, all the way through St. Bernard Parish into Orleans Parish and the low-lying neighborhoods along the Intercoastal Canal. After sunrise, residents in the Lower Ninth Ward said they heard explosions under the levee that held back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. Rumors quickly spread from house to house-either terrorists or racists were dynamiting the only barrier that prevented the entirety of the lake from drowning the mostly black population in the Lower Nine.

  The rumors were of course false. The levees burst because they were structurally weak and had only a marginal chance of surviving a category 3 storm, much less one of category 5 strength. Every state emergency official knew this. The Army Corps of Engineers knew this. The National Hurricane Center in Miami knew this.

  But apparently the United States Congress and the current administration in Washington, D.C., did not, since they had dramatically cut funding for repair of the levee system only a few months earlier.

  I had been successful in obtaining the address of my friend the junkie priest, Jude LeBlanc, from one of the MS-13 gang members. But at 9:00 a.m. Monday all of my priorities were rearranged for me when Helen Soileau walked into my office, her shield already hung on a lanyard from her neck. “Throw your shit in a bucket, Pops. Half the department is being assigned to the Big Sleazy,” she said.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Take your choice,” she replied.

  WE DIDN’T SEE the first large-scale wind damage until we were well east of Morgan City. The sugarcane was crushed flat in the fields, as though it had been steamrolled and matted into black dirt. Telephone poles were snapped in half, sections blown out of signboards, roofs ripped from stores in rural strip malls. The four-lane highway was patina-ed with leaves and gray mud from the flooded woods that lined each side of the roadway, and thousands of shrieking birds freckled the sky, as though they had no place to land. Helen was driving, her face somber, a dozen more departmental vehicles behind us, their flashers rippling with color. Some of the vehicles were towing boats that were packed to the gunwales with first-aid kits, gasoline-powered generators, donated food, clothing, and bottled water, all of it tarped down and swaying on bumper hitches.

  Helen was an attractive, muscular woman whose intelligence and integrity I had always admired. She had started her career as a meter maid at the NOPD, in an era when a female officer had to pay hard dues among her male colleagues. The fact she didn’t try to hide her androgynous nature had made her a special target for several members of the department, in particular a plainclothes by the name of Nate Baxter, a degenerate and former vice cop I genuinely believed belonged in a soap dish.

  One morning at roll call, just after a sniper had opened fire on pedestrians from a hotel rooftop in the Quarter, Nate took over from the watch commander and addressed all the uniformed patrol personnel in the room.

  “I want every swinging dick out there on the firing line, in vests and with maximum ordnance,” he said. “We’ve got one agenda. That guy gets cooled out. Nobody else gets hurt, civilians or cops. Everybody clear on that?”

  So far, so good.

  Nate turned his gaze on Helen, the skin denting at the corner of his mouth. “Helen, can you tell us whether ‘swinging dick’ includes you in or leaves you out?” he said.

  Several cops laughed. Helen was in the second row, bent forward, her eyes still fixed on the notepad that was propped on her thigh. There was a cough or two, then the room fell silent.

  “Glad you brought up the subject of genitalia, Detective,” she said. “A couple of weeks ago a transvestite CI told me you made a few cross-dressers cop your stick in the backseat of a cruiser when you were in Vice. Back then, the transvestite was using the name Rachel. But actually Rachel is a man and his real name is Ralph. Ralph said you’d undergone penile enhancement. Since I don’t get to use the same restroom as the swinging dicks, I can’t really say if Ralph is lying or not. Maybe these other officers know.”

  She stared thoughtfully into space. Nate Baxter’s career never recovered from that moment. He launched a vendetta against Helen through the departmental bureaucracy and as a consequence was always looked upon by his fellow officers as a malicious coward who couldn’t cut it on a level playing field.

  We were on the bridge over the Mississippi now, the wide brown expanse swollen and breathtaking down below, an upside-down houseboat spinning in the current as it floated out from under the bridge. Helen tore the wrapper on a granola bar with her teeth and spit the paper out on the steering wheel.

  “What’s bothering you?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she replied, one cheek tight with chunks of granola.

  I didn’t pursue it. We came down the other side of the bridge, swinging out on an elevated exit ramp above flooded woods whose canopy was stripped of leaves and strung with trash.

  “We’re supposed to coordinate with a half-dozen agencies down here, including NOPD. I say screw that,” she said. “I’m going to have a talk with all our people before we go in. We do our job and we maintain our own standards. That means we don’t shoot looters. Let the insurance companies take their own losses. But if somebody fires on us, we blow them out of their socks.”

  She looked at my face. “What’s funny?” she asked.

  “I wish I had still been with NOPD when you were there.”

  “Want to elaborate on that?”

  “No, ma’am, I really don’t,” I replied.

  She bit down on her granola bar and gave me another look, then drove on into the city. None of us was quite ready for what we would see.

  IT WASN’T THE miles of buildings stripped of their shingles and their windows caved in or the streets awash with floating trash or the live oaks that had been punched through people’s roofs. It was the literal powerlessness of the city that was overwhelming. The electric grid had been destroyed and the water pressure had died in every faucet in St. Bernard and Orleans parishes. The pumps that should have forced water out of the storm sewers were flooded themselves and totally useless. Gas mains burned underwater or sometimes burst flaming from the earth, filling the sky in seconds with hundreds of leaves singed off an ancient tree. The entire city, within one night, had been reduced to the technological level of the Middle Ages. But as we crossed under the elevated highway and headed toward the Convention Center, I saw one image that will never leave me and that will always remain emblematic of my experience in New Orleans, Louisiana, on Monday, August 29, in the year of Our Lord, 2005. The body of a fat black man was bobbing facedown against a piling. His dress clothes were puffed with air, his arms floating straight out from his sides. A dirty skim of yellow froth from our wake washed over his head. His body would remain there for at least three days.

  Any semblance of order at the Convention Center was degenerating into chaos. The thousands of people who had sought shelter there had been told to bring their own food for five days. Many of them were from the projects or the poorest n
eighborhoods in the city and did not own automobiles and had little money or food at the end of the month. Many of them had brought elderly and sick people with them-diabetics, paraplegics, Alzheimer’s patients, and people in need of kidney dialysis. The sun was white overhead, the air hazy and glistening with humidity. The concrete apron outside the Center was teeming with people trying to find shade or potable water. Almost all of them were yelling angrily at police cars and media vehicles.

  “You going to set up a command center here?” I said.

  I could see Helen biting her lower lip, her hands clenching on the steering wheel. “No, they’ll tear us apart,” she said. “The streets in the Quarter are supposed to be dry. I’m going to swing down toward Jackson Square -”

  “Stop!”

  “What is it?”

  “I just saw Clete Purcel. There, by the entrance.”

  Helen rolled down the window and squinted into the haze. The gush of superheated air through the window felt like steam blowing from the back of a commercial laundry. “What’s Clete doing?” she said.

  It took a moment for both of us to assimilate the scene taking place against the Convention Center wall. A huge, sunburned man, wearing filthy cream-colored slacks and a tropical shirt split at the shoulders, was trying to fit an inverted cardboard box over the body of an elderly white woman who was draped in a wheelchair. Her body was flaccid in death, and Clete could not get the box around her without knocking her out of the chair.

  “Hang on, Helen,” I said, and got out of the cruiser before she could reply.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw her make a U-turn, pause briefly, and head toward the French Quarter, the rest of the caravan trailing behind her. But Helen was a good soul and she knew I would hook up with her soon, probably with Clete in tow. She also knew you don’t leave your friends behind, regardless of what the rest of the world is doing.