The Tin Roof Blowdown (16 page)

“Have you heard any more from the Feds or NOPD?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“Write up what you just told me and fax it to Baton Rouge. Tell them to clean up their own shit while you’re at it. I want this stuff out of our hair.”

“Why the change in attitude?”

“Have you looked at The Weather Channel?”

“No,” I said.

“That new hurricane, what’s-its-name, the one that was supposed to smack Texas?”

“Rita?”

“It’s not.”

IS THERE A DESIGN in the events of our lives? Or do things just happen, much like a junkyard falling down a staircase? If it’s the latter, how do you deal with it?

If you have ever invested with regularity in the pari-mutuel arts, or shot craps in a game that made your hand sweat on the dice, or allowed yourself to believe you had the psychic power to intuit the next card out of the shoe at a blackjack table, you have probably crossed the wrong Rubicon on many occasions and are familiar with the following experience:

There is magic in your hands and your walk. The magenta sky above the track and the flamingos lifting out of a grassy pond in the center ground are indicators that your perfecta wheel cannot lose. Inside the casino, the dice are as hard-edged and solid as rubies in your palm, and you double your bets on the pass line each time you bounce the dice down the felt into the backboard. The plunging neckline of the young woman dealing out of the shoe at the blackjack table cannot compare in its allure to the thrill of receiving a low number on the fifth card of a five-card Johnny.

You know that you cannot lose, that it is God’s will that you not lose. Others draw close to you in the same way that candle moths surround an incandescent light burning inside a crystal container. They gasp in awe at both your recklessness and the vindication of your faith in yourself. They want to brush against you and absorb your power into their bodies.

Then things start to go south. Your horse is disqualified because the jockey has bumped another rider’s horse on the far turn. The dice turn to lumps of lead in your hand and come up treys, boxcars, and snake eyes. The young female dealer blackjacks on you and deals you every high card in the deck, busting you again and again, stifling a yawn, her cleavage hovering like a withdrawn invitation only inches from your face.

Welcome to “the dead zone.” It’s a special place that, unbeknown to himself, every degenerate gambler seeks. Check out the bar at the track after the seventh race. The people there are as happy as satiated hogs. They have lost the grocery money, the rent, the mortgage and car payment, even the vig they owe a Shylock. But they’re safe now because they have nothing else to lose. They also have the empirical evidence to prove once and for all time that the universe has conspired to cheat and injure them. Their personal failure is God’s, not theirs. The soul is packed in dry ice now, the battle over.

When I went into the coffee room at the department, several uniformed deputies were watching CNN. Their collective expression and posture reminded me of helicopter pilots I had seen many years ago in a predawn briefing room backdropped by the China Sea. Most of these pilots were warrant officers not over twenty years in age. But I could never forget the suppressed tension in their faces, the deliberate restraint in their voices, the self-imposed solipsism in their eyes that told you the dawn was indeed about to come up like thunder from China across the bay.

Hurricane Rita contained winds of 185 miles an hour and originally had been projected to make landfall somewhere around Matagorda Bay, northeast of Corpus Christi. Then its direction shifted farther to the east. Officials in Houston, fearing a repeat of Katrina in their own city, effected a massive evacuation, choking highways all the way to San Antonio and Dallas. Then the hurricane shifted direction again, this time almost certainly zeroing in on Beaumont and Port Arthur.

Texas was going to take the hit. Our exposure would be marginal, nothing more than minor wind damage, trees knocked down, a temporary power outage. We breathed a sigh of relief. Providence had given us a free pass.

Then the National Hurricane Center in Miami disabused us of our hubris. In fact, the forecast was unbelievable. Louisiana was about to get pounded full-force, with twenty-foot tidal surges and wind that would rip off roofs from Sabine Pass to the other side of the Atchafalaya River. More unbelievably, we were being told the storm would probably make landfall in Cameron Parish, just south of Lake Charles, the same place the eye of Audrey swept through in 1957. The tidal wave that preceded the ’57 storm curled over the courthouse and downtown area like a giant hammer and crushed it into rubble, killing close to five hundred people.

“Weren’t you around when Audrey hit?” a deputy asked as I stared up at the television screen.

“Yeah, I was,” I replied.

“On an oil rig?”

“On a seismograph barge,” I said.

“It was pretty bad, huh?”

“We got through it okay,” I said.

He was a crew-cut, martial-looking man, with too much starch in his uniform and a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. He removed the toothpick and dropped it in a waste can and focused his attention on the television screen. I could hear a wet sound in his throat when he swallowed.

No one wants to go to the same war twice. You pay your dues in order to enter the dead zone and you’re supposed to be safe. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works.

CHAPTER
13

NEW IBERIA AND LAFAYETTE were now filled with evacuees fleeing Hurricane Rita as well as those who had fled Katrina. Firearm and ammunition sales were booming. The original sympathy for the evacuees from New Orleans was incurring a strange transformation. Right-wing talk shows abounded with callers viscerally enraged at the fact evacuees were receiving a onetime two-thousand-dollar payment to help them buy food and find lodging. The old southern nemesis was back, naked and raw and dripping—absolute hatred for the poorest of the poor.

AT SUNSET Friday evening the air was as gold as pollen, as though Indian summer were upon us. The decrease in barometric pressure seemed to signal little more than a shower. What appeared to be rain rings were bream dimpling the surface on the edge of the lily pads. I could hear my elderly neighbor playing the piano behind an open window. Then the air grew cool and moist, and leaves began stripping from the trees in the yard, whirling in vortexes down the slope to the water. As the sky filled with dust, a shadow spread over the yards and gardens of the homes along East Main, and the bayou was suddenly wrinkled by a hard wind blowing from the southeast. My neighbor got up from her piano and began slamming down windows.

From my back steps I saw the aluminum roof of a picnic shelter in City Park peel away like the top of a sardine can and tumble end over end across the grass. I saw a man continue fishing when lightning struck an oak tree in the center of the park. I saw a man stripped to the waist in an airboat roar past our property, smiling serenely at the heavens. I heard a civil defense siren blowing at City Hall.

I went on duty at midnight and was given the opportunity to meditate once again on the biblical admonition that the sun is made to rise upon both the evil and the good, and the rain is sent to fall upon the just and unjust alike. Except for ripped shingles or tree limbs crashing on telephone or power lines, East Main was spared. But in south Iberia Parish, twelve feet of water surged into trailers and low-lying homes. That was nothing compared to the fate of the coastal parishes.

A tidal wave of salt water, mud, dead fish, oil sludge, and organic debris literally effaced the southern rim of Louisiana. Farther inland, what it did not efface, it ruined. Throughout the wetlands, almost every home was made uninhabitable, every telephone pole broken at ground level, every road made impassable. The rice and sugarcane fields were encrusted with saline, the farm machinery buried in mud, the settlements down by the Gulf reduced to twisted pieces of plumbing sticking out of grit that looked like emery paper.

The greatest suffering was incurred by animals. An estimated hundred thousand cattle drowned in Vermilion and Cameron parishes alone. They crowded onto galleries, tried to climb onto tractors and cane wagons, and even ended up on rooftops. But they drowned just the same.

I stood on top of a hay baler with a pair of binoculars and, facing south, made a one-hundred-eighty-
degree sweep from east to west and back again. I could not see a living creature. Not a dog or a cat, not even a bird. The trees had been stripped to the bark and looked like gnarled fingers. Brick houses were blown into birdshot. Fifty-foot shrimp boats lay upside down a hundred yards from water. Drowned sheep were stacked inside the floodgate of an irrigation lock, like zoo animals crowding against the bars of their cage. Cemetery crypts were obliterated, and the coffins washed into residential yards and in one instance through the broken front window of a country store. I saw at least thirty head of Herefords tangled in a barbed-wire fence, their stomachs bloated in the heat, swarms of gnats hovering above them.

By Monday morning I was used up.

“Go home, Streak,” Helen said.

“Nope,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I’ll go home when you do,” I said.

“I went home last night and came back. I ate supper and put on fresh clothes. I also took a nap. I put you in charge while I was gone.”

I stared at her emptily.

“Go home, bwana,” she said.

As I drove into New Iberia, the streets were drying in the sunshine, the sidewalks plastered with wet leaves. I parked my truck in my driveway and went inside the house. But Alafair and Molly and Clete were gone. I stripped off my clothes in the emptiness of the house and got in the shower, like the war veteran returning from a place that is still locked in his head but which he will never tell anyone about. Then I sat in the bottom of the stall, the water splaying on my back, and fell sound asleep.

WHILE RITA WAS shredding the coast of Louisiana, Eddy Melancon lay propped up in a bed close by a fourth-floor window at Our Lady of the Lake in Baton Rouge. He had a fine view of the night sky and the elevated interstate highway and the sheets of rain sweeping across the lines of cars entering and leaving the city. But Eddy cared little about the view or the fact a nurse had gone out of her way to move his bed and prop him up so he could look out upon the city and the light show in the sky. The truth was, Eddy Melancon could not stop thinking about his own person. It lay there, in the bed, as though dropped from ten thousand feet, disconnected from all motor controls, insentient, flaccid, and fed by tubes whose needles punctured his veins without Eddy’s feeling them.

It was like being buried alive inside his own body. Each time he fell asleep, he saw broken images in his head leading up to the moment somebody had locked down on him with a high-powered rifle. He heard the sound of the tiny emery wheel striking dryly on his cigarette lighter, then he both heard and smelled the flare of lighter fluid inside the flame guard. Just as he sucked the smoke deep into his lungs, he saw a needle-nosed projectile zipping over the floodwater, flying through the fire, making a thropping sound as it entered and exited his body, splintering his spinal cord like it was dried tuber.

In the dream, he wanted to wrap his arms over his face or dive into the water. But he couldn’t move or run or even drop the burning lighter from his hand. When he would wake, he would believe for just a moment that his terror was the result of a nightmare and that his motor control was now restored, that he could walk to a bathroom and urinate into a bowl while the day and the world adjusted to his needs. But his paralysis encased him like concrete. He would push out his tongue on his lips and close and open his eyes in the dark, waiting for either movement or sensation to find its way back into his body. He would drop his eyes to where his hands lay on the sheet and wait for them to obey his mental commands. That’s when he would hear a scream inside his head that was louder than any voice he had ever heard in the actual world.

Eddy studied the curtains of rain sliding down his window and the patterns of shadow they made on his skin. When the two men in hospital greens entered his room, he thought they were going to check his catheter or sponge-bathe him or hold a glass drinking straw to his mouth. Or maybe they would talk to him. His voice box had been spared. As long as he could talk, he still possessed a measure of control in his life. He could talk to these guys about his recovery. There must be ways to repair spinal breaks, he thought. Yeah, it was just a matter of getting to a better hospital in Houston or Boston or New York, places like that. Bertrand must have stashed the money from the house score. There would be plenty for good doctors and rehab programs. Yeah, let these local motherfuckers go play wit’ their bedpans, he told himself.

One of the men in greens stared down at Eddy, his face floating above him like a white balloon. “How you feeling?” he asked.

“I’m feeling okay,” Eddy whispered.

Why had he answered like that? Like some kid spitting watermelon seeds and tap-dancing for Mr. Charlie. That’s not the way he had talked to the hospital personnel before. What was different about this guy?

“Because we want you to be comfortable for the ride down to the OR,” the same man said.

“It’s the middle of the night,” Eddy said.

“Everything is haywire, Eddy. This storm really screwed us up,” the man said. He yawned and looked at his watch. “Let’s get you down the hall. I got to get home to my kids.”

The second man positioned a gurney next to Eddy’s bed. When a tree of lightning printed itself against a backdrop of black sky, Eddy saw the man’s face clearly. It was concave, the eyes recessed, the head elongated and bald, the lips the pink shade of an eraser on a pencil. The second man began disconnecting the wires and tubes that only moments earlier Eddy had looked upon as an annoyance.

“What you doin’, man?” he said.