Read Online The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke - Free Book Online Page B

state headquarters in North Louisiana. His street was still flooded, the water way up in his and his neighbors’ yards, but Otis was convinced the city’s storm-pump system would eventually kick in and drain all of uptown New Orleans. Why wouldn’t it? The city had gone under in ’65 and had come back better than ever. You just had to keep the right perspective.
    But as the piles of sawed limbs grew higher and higher in his backyard, he realized it would take a cherry picker to clear the biggest pieces of debris from his drive and he also realized that probably eighty percent of his neighbors had evacuated, leaving their homes to whoever wished to enter them. He didn’t condemn them, but he couldn’t understand a man who would give up his home either to the forces of nature or to lawless men.
    The sky turned purple at sunset and hundreds of birds descended into his backyard, feeding on the worms that had been flooded to the surface. Otis went into the kitchen and poured a glass of whiskey, put a teaspoon of honey in it, and sipped it slowly while he stared out the back window at the gold strips of sunlight that clung with a kind of fatal beauty to the ruined branches of his trees.
    “The toilet won’t flush,” Thelma, his daughter, said.
    “Did you fill the tank from the bathtub?” he asked.
    “It won’t flush because everything is backing up. It’s disgusting,” Thelma said.
    “The sewer system will be back online in no time. You’ll see.”
    “Why didn’t we leave like everybody else? It was stupid to stay here.”
    “This is one time I agree with her,” Melanie, his wife, said from the kitchen doorway. She was smoking a cigarette, her shoulder propped against the doorjamb, every gold hair on her head neatly in place.
    “I’ve fixed a cold supper for us—chicken sandwiches and cucumber salad, with ice cream for dessert,” Otis said. “I think we have a lot to be thankful for.”
    “Like our visitors out there,” Melanie said. She nodded toward the front of the house, blowing smoke from the corner of her mouth.
    Otis set down his glass of whiskey and went into the living room. Through the front windows and the tangle of downed tree limbs in the yard, he could make out four young black men in a boat farther up the street. They had cut the gas feed and tilted the motor up on the stern of the boat, so the propeller would not catch on the curb as they drifted onto the flooded lawn of a darkened house.
    One of them stepped down into the water and pulled the boat by its painter toward the front door.
    “Why not give our black mayor a call?” Melanie said.
    “That kind of talk doesn’t help anything,” Otis said.
    Melanie was quiet a long time. He heard her mashing out her cigarette, then felt her standing close behind him. “Can you tell if they’re armed?” she asked.
    “I can’t see them well in the shadows.” Otis glanced through a side window. “There’s Tom Claggart. I suspect if those fellows want trouble, they’ll find it with Tom.”
    “Tom Claggart is a blowhard and an idiot. He’s also a whoremonger,” Melanie said.
    Otis turned and stared at his wife.
    “Don’t look at me like that. Tom’s wife told me he gave her syphilis. He and his buddies go to cathouses on their hunting trips.”
    Otis didn’t want to talk about Tom Claggart. “We can’t be responsible for what vandals do down the street. I’ll go out and yell at them, but the owners of those houses made a choice and that’s the way it is.”
    “Don’t provoke them. Where’s your rifle?”
    “Our house is well lighted. They can see it’s occupied. They won’t come here.”
    “You don’t know that.”
    “Their kind live under rocks, Melanie. They don’t do well in daylight.”
    She was standing even closer to him now, the nicotine in her breath touching his face. Her voice dropped into a whisper. “I’m scared, Otis,” she said. She slipped her arm in his. He could feel the point of her breast against