Up on the levee a skinned pickup truck loaded with a family bounced down the road toward a boat ramp. Then a kid on a motorbike went by, followed by a black Humvee with tinted windows rolled halfway up.
A solitary turkey buzzard turned slowly overhead, as though in anticipation of a death that had not yet occurred. Then it tilted against the sky and glided farther out on the bay, perhaps seeking carrion in another place, or perhaps indicating respite, I didn’t know which. I did not like to dwell on the biblical allocation of threescore and ten. But at a certain age, consciousness of mortality is not an elective study.
“You worry too much about Molly and me,” Alafair said out of nowhere.
“Think so?” I said, our boat drifting unanchored in the wind now.
“What happens, happens. We’re not afraid. Why should you be?”
Because I live inside you, I thought. Because if you die, so do I.
“What did you say?” she asked.
“Nothing. I just talk to myself sometimes. It goes with the seventh-inning stretch.”
“You’re too much,” she said.
Later, a shower passed over the swamp, then the air turned cool and the sky brightened and we went back down the levee for supper at a restaurant that was built over the water. It had been a fine day, even though we had caught no fish, and we began straightening up the camp, washing and putting away the dishes, locking all the windows. Out on the bay, behind a distant line of trees, the sun seemed to be sliding off the watery rim of the world. A determined fisherman in a straw hat had dropped anchor in the willow islands, inside the clouds of mosquitoes that always gathered in the trees just before sunset and usually brought the sac-a-lait up just before dark. He kept wiping mosquitoes out of his face and jigging his pole, like an agitated man trying to impose magic on a fruitless pursuit. Then his line snagged in a tree and he stopped long enough to hose himself down with insect repellent before starting in again.
“Give me the truck keys, Dave, and I’ll bring the trailer around,” Alafair said.
“How about a piece of pecan pie before we go?” Molly said.
“I’d really like to get a little done on my novel tonight,” Alafair replied.
I gave her the keys and through the back window watched her start the truck and drive toward the crushed brick ramp where we always put the boat in, the empty trailer bouncing behind her. I poured the last of the coffee from a pot on the stove, added a teaspoon of sugar, and drank from it. Through the front window I could see Alafair back the trailer down the ramp until the wheels were hubcap-deep and the taillights submerged. Then she put on a pair of rubber boots she had taken from the truck bed and began wading into the shallows.
I had thought she would wait for me. Normally when we loaded the boat back onto the trailer, one of us backed the trailer into the water while the other cranked up the outboard and powered the boat onto the rollers, allowing the driver to hook the winch onto the bow and hand-crank the boat snug.
Out among the flooded willows, I saw the solitary fisherman lean down in his boat and pick up something from the bottom. He knocked his hat off his head to give himself better vision and raised the rifle to his shoulder. I could not make out the features of his face, but the moon had started to rise and I saw the light gleam on his bald head inside the shadows.
I was already out the screen door and running down the slope when he let off the first round. Chapter 28
P ERHAPS A GUST of wind buffeted his boat or the sound of my bursting out the screen door startled him, but the bullet went wide by perhaps two inches and whanged off the housing on my outboard motor. The rifle looked to be a semi-automatic carbine, maybe a .223, with a suppressor on the muzzle. The second and third shots came out of the barrel with a flash and made the same sound as the first round, like someone spitting a dry object from his mouth. Alafair had run in a crouch on the near side of the boat, then had thrown herself to the ground behind the truck. The back half of the truck was parked deep enough in the water so that the shooter could not fire under it.
The shooter took one shot at me just as I ran for the inside of the cabin. The bullet notched a bright slice of wood out of the doorjamb and broke glass somewhere in the bedroom. I landed on the floor, on my face, and could see Molly crouching below the drain board, working her way toward me.
“Did he hit Alafair?” she said.
“No, she’s behind the truck. He can’t get to her unless he moves his boat.”
Two more rounds blew glass and a potted plant out of the kitchen window, powdering Molly’s head and shoulders.
I crawled on my hands and knees into the bedroom, where my rucksack lay in the corner. I reached inside the flap and felt my hand clasp the checkered grips of my .45. I unsnapped the holster strap and slung the holster aside, then found the extra magazine I kept in the rucksack and shoved it in my back pocket. I pulled back the slide and fed a brass-jacketed 230-grain hollow-point into the chamber.
I crawled back into the kitchen. Molly was crouched at the edge of the front door, trying to see where Alafair was, her cell phone in her hand. “I called the St. Martin Sheriff’s Department. Is it Bledsoe?” she said.
“It must be. Look, the nine-one-one response time out here might be fifteen minutes. I’m going outside. Stay on the floor.”
“I’m going out there with her.”
“No, no, no,” I said. “Don’t do that. Please, stay here. Please don’t argue about it.”
“No, I’m not going to leave her there.”
I started to speak, but I knew my words would be wasted and that I couldn’t afford to lose any more time. Just then, the shooter opened up again, pocking holes in the truck and flattening a tire and drilling two holes in the icebox. I went out the door in a run, crouching low, my right arm extended in front of me, firing at the willow island.
I saw the flash of the shooter’s muzzle again and realized the shooter had changed his angle of fire. I suspected he was using an auxiliary electric motor and had moved the boat closer to the edge of the willows so he would have easier access to the bay. I dropped to my knees next to Alafair.
Her face was cut under one eye, her clothes and forearms streaked with mud.
“Are you hurt, Alf?” I said.
“No, a piece of aluminum hit me, I think,” she said. “I saw him. He’s got a semi-automatic rifle.”
“Is it Bledsoe?”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“I’m going to get this guy. Molly already put in the nine-one-one. Stay here until the St. Martin Parish guys arrive. Don’t try to go to the cabin. There’s no way the guy can get on land.”
Hardly were the words out of my mouth when Molly ran from the cabin to the truck, bending low, her cell phone in one hand, a small first-aid kit in the other. She blew her hair out of her eyes and looked at me, her cheeks red. She placed her hand against the side of her neck and examined it. Then she touched her neck with the ends of her fingers. There was a stripe across the side of it, like a rope burn that had started to bleed.
I wanted to be mad at her for leaving the cabin and exposing herself to greater danger, but how do you become angry at someone who will risk her life to bring a first-aid kit to her loved ones?
I worked my way to the front of the truck and fired three more rounds at the shadowy outline of the willows, the ejected shells tinkling on the crushed brick. I heard one round knock into wood, another blow water into the air, and another bite into metal. My slide locked open on an empty chamber.
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.
space
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.