“He’s at work,” she said.
She wore black sweatpants and a white T-shirt that was flecked with tiny pieces of leaves. “I was cleaning up the backyard when you rang the bell.”
“Are you Otis Baylor’s daughter?”
“I’m Thelma Baylor.”
“Is your mother here?”
“My stepmother is at the grocery store.”
“Could I talk with you? I’m investigating the shooting of the looters in front of your home in New Orleans. We have a lead or two, but I still can’t quite picture where these guys were when they were shot.”
“What does it matter? They were shot.”
“That’s true, isn’t it? Could I come in?”
“You can watch me rake leaves if you want.”
I followed her through the kitchen into the backyard. On both sides of her simple house were antebellum plantation homes of the kind one normally sees only on postcards. One hundred yards farther down the bayou, across the drawbridge, was a trailer slum where every form of social decay imaginable was a way of life. “You like New Iberia?” I asked.
“Are there always traffic jams at the Wal-Mart, or is that just because of the storm?” she said, drawing a bamboo rake through leaves that were black with mold.
I figured this one was going to be a long haul. I sat down on the back steps. “Did you hear the shots?”
Her eyes looked into neutral space, her rake missing a beat. “I heard a shot. It woke me up.”
“Just one shot?”
“Yes.”
“Where were you sleeping?”
Her face looked pale and round in the shade, devoid of expression, her lipstick glossy and unnatural, her bangs as precise as a nun’s wimple. “In my room.”
“Upstairs?”
“Yes, my room is upstairs. Do you want to talk to my father? I don’t see how any of this is helpful.”
“Do you think your next-door neighbor, Tom Claggart, is capable of popping a couple of looters?”
“Mr. Claggart is an upended penis with arms and legs and a face drawn on it. I don’t know what he’s capable of.”
Time to take a chance, I told myself. “I know about the attack on your person two years ago, Miss Thelma. I have a daughter a little older than you. If I thought she was in danger, particularly from the kind of men who hurt you, I’d take them off at the neck.”
Her rake slowed in the leaves, her chest rising and falling.
“I lost my mother and a wife to violent men,” I continued. “I think men who abuse women are invariably physical and moral cowards. I think a man who rapes a woman should be first in line at the injection table.”
She became motionless. Grains of dirt were stuck to the side of her mouth.
“I think you saw and know more than you’re telling me,” I said.
“I saw a guy floating facedown in the water. Another guy was wounded. A third guy started running through the water. A fourth guy was trying to hold the wounded guy in the boat.”
“That’s very detailed. I appreciate it.” I made a note on a pad and put away my pen, as though we were finished. “Where was your father?”
“In his bedroom.”
“Where was your mother?”
“She’s my stepmother. My real mother is dead.”
“Where was your stepmother?”
“In the bedroom with my father.”
“Did your old man shoot those guys?”
“If you won’t believe him, you won’t believe me. Why bother asking?”
“I think you carry a big burden, Miss Thelma. I’m not here to add to it.”
“You need to shut up, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“Pardon me?”
“Why do you assume you know what happened to me? Why do you assume my family wants revenge on people we have nothing against? I can’t stand people like you. You don’t have any idea of what it’s like to be a rape victim. If you did, you wouldn’t be patronizing and trying to manipulate me.”
“I apologize if I gave that impression.”
“It’s not an impression.”
I stood up from the steps and brushed off the seat of my trousers. “I’m sorry just the same.”
“Fuck you.”
As I left the yard, I glanced back over my shoulder. Her body seemed to float inside a nimbus of light particles and dust and smoke and bits of desiccated leaves. For just a moment, as she resumed her work, stroking the rake hard across the ground, the bamboo tines splintering on the root system of a cypress tree, the intensity of her concentration and anger gave her a kind of integrity that I always associated with Alafair.
THE FOLLOWING DAY I called the Baylor house and asked Mrs. Baylor to come into the department for an interview.
“More about the looters who were shot?” she said.
“That’s correct.”
“Is this absolutely necessary?”
“Yes, ma’am, it is,” I said.
“We’re out on Old Jeanerette Road, just past Alice Plantation. Why don’t you come here if you want to talk?”
I realized Thelma had not told her stepmother of my visit. “I’d be happy to.”
“Mr. Robicheaux, let’s do this on another basis. I seriously believe you’re wasting your time with us, but nonetheless we’d like to be your friend. Can we take you and your family to dinner? I think you’ll see we’re truthful people and want to assist you in any way we can. But the reality is we’re bystanders who have no idea who shot those men.”
“That’s kind of you. But there’s a protocol I have to pursue. Will you be home in the next half hour?”
“No, I have a doctor’s appointment.”
“How about tomorrow?”
“I’m not sure. May I call you?”
“I need to make an appointment with you right now, Mrs. Baylor.”
“Unfortunately that’s not possible. I’ve tried to be cooperative, Mr. Robicheaux. But this is starting to get a little tiresome. I’d better say good-bye now. I wish you success in your investigation.”
The line went dead.
Wrong move, Mrs. Baylor.
space
I WENT INTO Helen’s office. “I interviewed Otis Baylor’s daughter yesterday and just got an Academy Award nose-in-the-air performance from his wife,” I said.
“Slow it down, Pops,” she said, leaning back in her swivel chair.
“They’re lying,” I said, spreading my notes on Helen’s desk. “Look, both Otis and his daughter say they heard a single shot. Both use the same language. They say ‘It woke me up.’ When I mentioned multiple shots to the daughter, she even corrected me. I was bothered from the get-go by Baylor’s statement that he heard a single shot. That’s not what people say when they’re awakened by gunfire. All they know is that a frightening sound shook them out of their sleep. They don’t count shots.”
I saw Helen’s attention sharpen.
“Both Otis and Thelma described what they saw in the same sequence. Each of them began by mentioning a man floating in the water. There were four guys in or around the boat. But Otis and Thelma mention the kid who was floating in the water first. Why not the guy hemorrhaging blood out of his mouth? I think they had their story prepackaged.”
Helen rubbed at the back of her neck. Whenever she was pensive, her face always went through an androgynous transformation that was both lovely and mysterious to watch. I believed that several different people lived inside her, but I never told her that. Her lovers had included many men and women over the years, including Clete Purcel. Sometimes she looked at me in a way that made me feel sexually uncomfortable, as though one of the women who lived inside her had decided to stray.
“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 loo
ked 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
N EW 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.