The Tin Roof Blowdown (2 page)

For just a moment he almost forgets the ball of pain that lives twenty-four hours a day in the base of his spine. The Hispanic woman whose name is Natalia is fixing coffee and warm milk for him in the tiny kitchen off the living room. Her cotton sundress is dark purple and printed with bone-colored flowers that have pink stamens. She’s a thin woman whose strong hands and muscular tautness belie the life she leads. She glances at him over her shoulder, her face full of concern and pity for the man who roaches back his hair as Mickey Rooney did in old American movies she has rented from the video store.

When she hooks, she works with a pimp who drives an independent cab. She and her pimp usually find johns in the early a.m. along Bourbon and take them either to a private parking lot behind a burned-out building off Tchoupitoulas or a desiccated frame house owned by the pimp’s brother-in-
law on North Villere, thereby avoiding complications with their more organized competitors, most of whom enjoy established relationships with both cops and the vestiges of old Mob.

Natalia brings him his coffee and warm milk and a single powdered beignet from the Café du Monde on a tray. She draws the blinds, turns the electric fan on him, and asks, “You want me to do it for you?”

“No, I don’t need it right now. I’ll wait until later in the day.”

“I don’t think you got no sleep last night.”

He watches the rainwater feathering off the roof and makes no reply. When he sits up on the rollaway bed, tentacles of light wrap around his thighs and probe his groin. Natalia sits down beside him, her dress dropping into a loop between her knees. Her hair is black and thick and she washes it often so it always has a sheen in it, and when she takes it down on her shoulders she is truly lovely to look at. She doesn’t smoke or drink, and there’s never a hint of the life she leads in her clothes or on her skin, not unless you include the tracks inside her thighs.

Her face is lost in thought, either about him or herself, he’s not sure. To her, Jude LeBlanc is a mystery, one she never quite understands, but it’s obvious she accepts and loves him for whatever he is or isn’t and imposes no judgment upon him.

“Can I do something else for you?”

“Like what?”

“Sometimes I feel I don’t ever do you no good, that I can’t give you nothing,” she says.

“You fixed breakfast for me,” he says.

She changes her position and kneels behind him on the rollaway, rubbing his shoulders, clutching him briefly to her, resting her cheek against the back of his head. “They got drugs in Mexico the pharmaceutical companies don’t allow on the market here,” she says.

“You’re my cure,” he replies.

She holds him, and for just a moment he wants to release all the desperation and hopelessness and unrelieved sense of loss that have characterized his life. But how do you explain to others that a false Gleason score on a prostate biopsy can result in so much damage to a person’s life? Most people don’t even understand the terminology. Plus he does not wish to rob others of their faith in the exactitude of medical science. To do so is, in a way, the same as robbing them of the only belief system they have.

The Gleason scale had indicated that the cancer had not spread outside the prostate. As a consequence the surgeon had elected not to take out the erectile nerve. The positive margins left behind went into the lymph nodes and the seminal vessels.

Natalia flattens herself against him, pressing her loins tightly into his back, and he feels desires stirring in him that he tries not to recognize, perhaps secretly hoping they will preempt the problems of conscience that prevent him from ever escaping his own loneliness.

He gets up from the rollaway, trying to hide his erection as he puts on his trousers. His Roman collar has fallen off the nightstand and a tangle of animal hair and floor dirt has stuck to the bottom rim. He goes to the sink and tries to clean it, rubbing the smudge deeper into the collar’s whiteness, splashing it with grease from an unwashed pot. He leans heavily on his hands, his sense of futility more than he can hide.

Outside, the velocity of the wind is fanning the rain off the roof in sheets. A flowerpot topples from the balcony and bursts on the bricks below. Across the courtyard, a neighbor’s ventilated wood shutters rattle like tack hammers on their hinges.

“You going to the Ninth Ward today?” Natalia asks.

“It’s the only place that will have me,” he replies.

“Stay with me,” she says.

“Are you afraid of the storm?” he asks.

“I’m afraid for you. You need to be here, with me. You can’t be without your medicine.”

She calls it his “medicine” to protect his feelings, even though she knows he’s been arrested twice with stolen prescription forms and once with morphine from an actual heist, that in reality he is no different from her or any other junkie in the Quarter. The irony is that a peasant woman from the Third World, one who works as a prostitute to fuel her own addiction, has a spiritual love and respect for him that few in his own society would be willing to grant.

He feels a sudden tenderness for her that makes his loins turn to water. He puts his mouth on hers, then goes out into the rain, a newspaper over his head, and catches one of the few buses still running down to the lower end of the Ninth Ward.

CHAPTER
3

OTIS BAYLOR PROUDLY calls himself a North Alabama transplant who is at home anyplace in the world, New Orleans or New Iberia or wherever his insurance company cares to send him. He’s effusive in manner, generous in his giving, and devoted to his family. If at all possible, he refuses to judge others and to be marked by the prejudices of either his contemporaries or the people of his piney-woods birthplace, where as a boy he witnessed his father and uncle attend cross lightings in full Klan regalia.

In fact, Otis learned the insurance business from the bottom up, working a debit route in the Negro and blue-collar neighborhoods of Birmingham. Where other salesmen had failed, Otis was a shining success. At a convention of salespeople in Mobile, a cynical rival asked him his secret. “Treat folks with respect and you’ll be amazed at how they respond,” Otis answered.

Today he drives home early in rain and heavy traffic, telling himself that neither he nor his family will be undone by the forces of nature. His house was built in 1856 and was mute witness to Yankee occupation, epidemics of yellow jack, street battles between Union loyalists and White Leaguers, the lynching of Italian immigrants from streetlamps, and tidal surges that left the bodies of drowned clipper ship sailors hanging in trees. The men who built Otis’s house had built it right, and with the gasoline-powered generators he has placed in his carriage house, the flashlights and medical supplies and canned food and bottled water he has packed into his pantries and his attic, he is confident he and his family can persevere through the worst of natural calamities.

Have faith in God, but also have faith in yourself. That’s what Otis’s daddy always said.

But as he stares at the rain sweeping through the live oak trees in his yard, another kind of fear flickers inside him, one that to him is even more unsettling than the prospect of the hurricane that is churning toward the city, sucking the Gulf of Mexico into its maw.

Otis has always believed in the work ethic and taking care of one’s self and one’s own. In his view, there is no such thing as luck, either good or bad. He believes that victimhood has become a self-sustaining culture, one to which he will never subscribe. When people fall on bad times, it’s usually the result of their own actions, he tells himself. The serpent didn’t force Eve to pick forbidden fruit, nor did God make Cain slay his brother.

But if Otis’s view is correct, why did undeserved suffering come in such a brutal fashion to his homely, sad, overweight daughter, his only child, whose self-esteem was so low she was overjoyed to be invited to the senior prom by a rail of a boy with dandruff on his shoulders and glasses that made his eyes look like a goldfish’s?

After the prom, Thelma and her date had headed up Interstate 10 to a party, except the boy, who had moved to New Orleans only two months earlier, got lost and drove them into a neighborhood not far from the Desire Welfare Project. Mindlessly, the boy killed the engine and asked directions of a passerby. When he discovered his battery was dead and he couldn’t restart the engine, he walked to a pay phone to call Otis, leaving Thelma by herself.

The three black thugs who stumbled across her were probably ripped on weed and fortified wine. But that alone would not explain the ferocity of their attack on Otis’s daughter. They stuffed a red bandana in her mouth and twisted her arms behind her while they forced her between two buildings. Then they took turns raping and sodomizing her while they burned her skin with cigarettes.

Two years have passed since that night and Otis still seeks explanations. Thelma’s attackers were never caught, and Otis doubts they ever will be. Psychiatrists and therapists and the minister from Otis’s church have done little good in Thelma’s recovery, if “recovery” is the word. He wakes in the middle of the night and sits by himself in the den, determined that his wife will not discover the level of torment in his soul.

More important, perhaps, he refuses to be embittered or to join ranks with his neighbors who comprised part of the forty percent of the electorate that voted for the former Klansman and Nazi David Duke in a gubernatorial runoff.

He makes a cheese, lettuce, and mayonnaise sandwich, places it on a tray with a can of soda and a long-stemmed rose, and carries the tray up to Thelma’s room. She is bent over her desk, dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans with big brass brads on them, earphones clamped on her head. He has no idea what she is listening to. Sometimes she is enthralled by recordings of birdsong or waterfalls; other times she listens to heavy-metal bands that make Otis wish he had been born deaf.

“I thought you might want a snack,” he says.

Her mouth is painted with purple lipstick, her hair dark and freshly shampooed and clipped in bangs so that it looks like a helmet. Her face wears a perpetual pie-plate expression that makes others feel the problem in communicating with her is theirs, not hers. She vacillates between bouts of anorexia, binge eating, and bulimia. By normal standards, she would not be considered a likable person. But why should she be? Otis asks himself. How many young girls were psychologically prepared to deal with the damage these men had inflicted upon her?

She begins eating the sandwich without removing the earphones or speaking to him. He reaches down and lifts the foam-rubber pads from her head.

“Can’t you say hello to your old man?” he asks.

“Hi, Daddy,” she says.

“Want to help me latch the shutters when you’re finished?”

She looks up at him. An intense thought, like a dark bird with a hooked beak, seems to hide behind her eyes. “A civil defense guy said it’s going to be awful.”

“It could be. But we’re tough guys.”

He tries to read her expression. It’s not one of fear or apprehension. In fact, he wonders if it isn’t one of fulfilled expectation. She’s a reader of Nostradamus and is drawn to prophecies of destruction and death, as though she wishes to see the unhappiness in her own life transferred into the lives of others.

“The insurance companies are going to screw the city, aren’t they? Does your company write exceptions for water damage?” she says.

“That’s silly.”

“Not if you’re one of the people about to get screwed.”

He leaves the room and closes the door behind him, repressing the anger that blooms in his chest.

Downstairs his wife is dropping thirty-pound bags of crushed ice into the Deepfreeze. Her name is Melanie and she insists that he not call her “Mel,” even though that was the affectionate nickname he gave her when they first courted.

“Why are you doing that?” he asks.

“So we’ll have a way to preserve our food if we have a total outage,” she replies, a cloud of escaped cold air rising into her face.

He starts to explain that he’s already covered that possibility with his installation of gasoline-operated generators, that in effect she’s displacing the room in the freezer that should be used for all the perishables they can pack into it.

But he doesn’t argue. He was a widower when he met her five years ago on a beach in the Bahamas. She was a divorcée, deeply tanned and gold-haired and beautiful, much younger than he, a strong woman physically, bold in her look, her brown eyes wide-set and unblinking, her laughter suggesting disregard for convention and perhaps a degree of sexual adventurism. She was the kind of woman who could be a friend as well as a lover.

Otis was fifty-three at the time, prematurely bald but proud of the power in his hands and shoulders and not ashamed of his libido or the profuse way he sweated when he worked or the scent of testosterone his clothes sometimes carried. He was what he was and didn’t pretend otherwise. Obviously Melanie, or “Mel,” did not find him an unattractive man.

They were opposites in many ways, but each seemed to possess a set of qualities that compensated for a deficiency in the other, she with her urban sophistication and degree in finance from the University of Chicago, he with his work ethic and his common sense in dealing with people.

They said good-bye in the Bahamas without consummating their brief courtship but continued to talk long-distance to each other and exchange presents and e-mails. Two months passed, and on a summer night when the light was high in the sky and he could no longer stand his loneliness, Otis asked Melanie to meet him at the Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta. He was surprised at her aggressiveness in bed and the fact she came three times their first night together, something no other woman had ever done for him. He proposed one week later.

His friends thought he was impetuous and that perhaps he was being taken advantage of by a woman twenty years his junior. But what did he have to lose? he told them. His daughter needed a mother; Otis needed a wife; and let’s face it, he said, women with Melanie’s looks didn’t come his way every day.