The Tin Roof Blowdown (43 page)

I let the magazine drop loose from the butt of the .45 and pulled the loaded magazine from my back pocket and jammed it into the butt. I released the slide, feeding a shell into the chamber. But before I could get off a shot, the shooter cranked his outboard and spun the hull of his boat into open water, plowing a trough across the bay.

I pushed my boat off the trailer, climbed in over the bow, and started the engine. My boat was only sixteen feet long and was utilitarian in construction and unremarkable in appearance. But the 115-horsepower Yamaha mounted on its stern gave it thrust and capability that were far beyond the expectations for a humble bass boat. I twisted the throttle open and mud and dead vegetation boiled under the propeller. The bow rose into the air and the bottom swerved sideways as I slid between two willow islands. In seconds the hull was slapping across the bay as fast as a speedboat.

Less than one hundred yards away, I could see the shooter heading for a grove of dead cypress by the levee. He was hunched low in the stern, glancing back over his shoulder as he entered a cove of dead water coated with algae. He swerved around a log, scraping against fluted cypress trunks, and went deeper into the cove, looking back again, his propeller probably miring in nests of hyacinth roots. He disappeared inside the cypress, but I could hear his engine whining, like a skill saw biting into a nail.

Above the cove, on the levee, I saw the lights of a vehicle go on and off and then remain off.

I went straight into the cove, sliding across the tops of downed trees, clanging against the hollow trunk of a tupelo gum. Up ahead, on the far side of the cypress, I could see the grassy slope of the levee and, on top, the square outline of a Humvee silhouetted against the sky.

The man in the boat was in trouble. He couldn’t get through the trash in the water to the levee bank and I was now no more than twenty yards from him. Inside the gloom, I saw him pick up his rifle, catch hold of a tree limb, and jump over the side into the water, hoping to find a solid bottom.

Instead, he went chest-high into the water, his shoes sinking into silt and layers of rotted vegetation. He slogged through the flooded trees toward the bank, the back of his shaved head white in the moonglow. At the edge of the water was a half-sunken commercial boat of some kind, with a home-carpentered plywood cabin aft, the entire hull soft with decay and scrolled with the scales of morning glory vines, the flooded hold a home for gars and alligators.

If he thought his luck could not get worse, he was wrong. The Humvee on the levee came to life and drove away, leaving the shooter to his fate. He struggled through the water, trying to knock down tree branches with one hand and keep his rifle dry and in the air with the other. Then he went behind a tree trunk and I lost sight of him.

I cut my engine and climbed out of my boat onto a cypress knee, then lowered myself into the water. I pushed the boat away from me, across a clearing, and watched it slide through the film of algae on the water, then clank against a tree.

A solitary shot came from behind the pilothouse of the sunken boat.

I leveled my .45 across a tree branch with two hands and sighted on the pilothouse. I cannot say why the shooter took cover there. The wood was as soft as decayed cork, the protective properties of the structure an illusion. But I suspected the shooter did not have a lot of choices at this point in his life and looked upon a man-made construction as the natural place to seek refuge in an alluvial piece of geography where he never thought he would find himself trapped and alone.

I pulled the trigger. Flame flew into the darkness and the recoil brought my wrists up into the air. The second time I fired I heard him cry out. I had six rounds left in the .45. I fired a third round and saw wood explode out of the back of the pilothouse.

He started wading up the mudflat onto the levee, limping, the rifle still in his hand. I lowered the sight on the small of his back and pulled the trigger again, except this time I didn’t stop firing until the magazine was empty and my ears were deaf from the explosions.

I waded through a deep spot in the cove, then felt my shoes touch a hard bottom. I fitted my hand on the back of the half-sunken boat and pulled myself up on the levee, still shaking from the pursuit and the exchange of gunfire. The shooter lay facedown in the grass, his arms spread out by his sides, like a man who had fallen from a high altitude and pancaked into the earth. I lay the .45 in the grass and turned him over on his back. The exit wounds in his chest were the size of quarters, the cloth around them torn outward.

At first I did not recognize the shooter because of the shaved head and the sutured injuries in his scalp and the look of astonishment that had frozen on his face.

Then I realized that Ronald Bledsoe had not only tried to kill my family but had also screwed his partner. I guess I should have felt pity for the man I had just killed, but I didn’t. I also suspected he had invested most of his adult life in doing evil to others. In fact, I suspected he was one of those whose past consists of deeds we never want to learn about.

Looks like you got a shitty deal, Bobby Mack, I thought to myself. But who knows? Maybe not all is lost. Maybe they play Texas Hold ’Em down in Hell.

OTIS BAYLOR did not consider himself proficient in many skills, but there was one element in his life he was certain about: He was a natural-born insurance man. He knew how to provide it from the cradle to the grave. He knew people and what they needed and how to talk to them. And he also knew how to find them and to find out anything about them, particularly when they filed claims.

In his visit to the Loreauville Quarters, it had not taken him long to discover through the neighbors that Bertrand Melancon had an auntie in the Ninth Ward. It took him even less time to find her name in a database shared by his former employer. She had filed a claim for damage done to her house by the floodwaters from Lake Pontchartrain, little knowing that in all probability the mention of floodwater virtually guaranteed she would receive nothing.

But Otis Baylor was not worrying about the misfortune of Bertrand Melancon’s family members. Melancon had been to his house. The car tag left behind on the road was incontestable evidence he had been there. The purpose of his visit had remained unknown, but the fact he had been there was, in Otis’s mind, justification for whatever Otis did next.

Then, while eating Saturday night supper with his family, a detective had knocked on his door and given him information that changed his entire perspective about his relationship to his wife, who had deceived him, and a rapist who had robbed his daughter of her soul.

He did not sleep Saturday night and he spent much of Sunday sorting out his bills, paying them selectively, so that his utility services were not turned off and he did not default on the mortgage for his house in New Orleans. By midafternoon he knew he would get no rest until he went to the source of all his grief.

He called a friend who worked as an adjuster for the company that carried the policy on the house in the Ninth Ward owned by Bertrand Melancon’s aunt.

“Her name is Clemmie Melancon,” Otis said. “I suspect she’s long gone, but since she filed a claim, I figured you might have a mailing address or contact phone number for her.”

“She evacuated to the Superdome, but she’s back home now,” the adjuster said.

“In the Ninth Ward?”

“She’s not in the worst part of it, but, yeah, she’s back home. She’s got Parkinson’s. I think all those people down there are going to get bulldozed eventually.”

“How’s her claim looking?”

“Forget it.”

“Thanks for your help,” Otis said, and started to hang up.

“It’s true, you been teaching the claimants how to slide one by us?” the friend said.

“‘Slide’ is the wrong word. Think more in terms of ‘wrecking ball,’” Otis said, this time hanging up.

It was 3:46 p.m. Outside, the sky was gray, the wind blowing, wet leaves plastering against the windows of his home office. Otis took his car keys from his pants pocket and spun them on his finger.

“Where you going, Daddy?” Thelma asked.

She stood in the doorway, one hip against the jamb, her expression inquisitive and innocent, the way it used to be before she and her date had gotten lost in a neighborhood that in minutes swallowed her alive.

“My father and my uncle were members of the Ku Klux Klan,” he said. “They joined a hateful organization because they had been taught by others to resent themselves. My father was a good man, but he never understood who his real enemy was. It wasn’t people of color. It was the dragon that lived inside him. You think maybe it’s time you and I go look at the dragons?”

THE RAIN HAD STOPPED and the night sky had cleared when Otis Baylor and his daughter entered the Ninth Ward of Orleans Parish. The topography, the windowless houses, the layers of building debris and garbage and dried flotsam did not look real but instead resembled a movie set or perhaps scenes spliced together from World War II black-and-white footage of a bombed-out city, leached of color, the only light provided by cook fires wavering under sheets of corrugated tin the remaining residents had propped across cinder blocks or stacks of bricks.

Thelma had been silent for the last hour, and Otis wondered if he had asked too much of her, if indeed he had not made a choice for her that wasn’t his to make. He steered around a section of the street that had caved into a canal.

“Daddy?” Thelma said.

“Yes?” he said.

“If he’s there, what are you going to do?”

“I’m not sure. I’m not even sure I trust myself about that.”

“Will you hurt him?”

“I can’t say. But I might. I think I might like to do that. Until Mr. Robicheaux came to our house, I thought maybe I was going to kill him.”

“You make me sad when you talk like that.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not who you are.”

Otis didn’t reply and kept his thoughts to himself, lest his daughter see a side to his personality that even he feared.

He was amazed at how easy it was to find the house owned by Bertrand Melancon’s aunt. Someone had propped up the mailbox in the front yard and raked the mud off the numbers, even though there would probably be no postal delivery in the Ninth Ward for months, if ever. The yard was stacked with virtually everything the house had once contained: cloth-covered chairs and a sofa, a refrigerator, mattresses, bedsprings, a television set, clothes, food, a chest of drawers with flower decals pasted all over it, stripped wallpaper and carpeting, all of it caked with a greenish-black sludge that had dried like plastic. The windows of the house were tacked over with plywood, a screen in place on the entrance. In the driveway, on the side of the house, a young black man and an older black woman in a dress that hung on her like a sack were sitting on hard chairs by a fire burning in a ventilated oil drum.

Neither one of them looked up when Otis approached them. Six slices of white bread, with pieces of cheese on them, were browning on a refrigerator grill above the fire.

“You know who I am?” Otis asked.

Bertrand raised his eyes and lowered them again. Then he looked at the car parked on the street and the young woman in the passenger seat. “Yes, suh, I ain’t got no doubt who you are.”

“Who are you, ma’am?” Otis asked the woman.

“Who are you, standing in my drive, axing questions?” she said. Her skin was as wrinkled as old putty, her breasts nothing more than dried dugs. Her movement was erratic, as though her motor control would not coordinate with itself. One of her eyelids drooped. Her hair was so thin it looked like duck down on her scalp.

“My name is Otis Baylor. The young woman in the car is my daughter. Her name is Thelma. I suspect you’re Miss Clemmie, Bertrand’s auntie.”

The woman watched the cheese melt on the bread slices. She picked up a tin can from her lap, bent over, and spit snuff in it.

“Did Bertrand tell you what happened to my daughter, Miss Clemmie?”

“She ain’t part of this, suh,” Bertrand said.

“You’re staying at her house. She’s giving your refuge. That makes her part of it. Where’s your grandmother?”

“Inside, resting. It’s cool tonight. She t’ought she’d rest.”

“Mr. Robicheaux says you came to my house and tried to make amends. How does a man like you make amends for what he did, Mr. Melancon?”

“I wanted to give y’all some diamonds I taken from a man who taken them from somebody else.”

“That’s an insult.”

“Suh, I ain’t mean to hurt y’all no more. I t’ought I was—” He stopped and widened his eyes, as though smoke were in them. “I ain’t gonna say no more. Call the cops or do what you come here to do.”

Otis wore a short-sleeved shirt that suddenly seemed too small for his chest and throat, so small and tight he couldn’t breathe. “You wait here,” he said.

He went inside the house without knocking. It was dark inside and he could hear the hum of mosquitoes in the rooms. The floor and walls seemed to be covered with the same greenish-black sludge or mold that he had seen on the debris piled in the yard. A woman lay on a cot in the hallway, breathing audibly, a pillow stuffed behind her head. “That you, Bertrand?” she said.