“Almost all the people in the attic drowned. I dropped the children out the window, but I didn’t see them again in the water. Most of the others was too old or too big. I left them behind. I just left them behind and swam toward a big tree that was floating past. I could hear them yelling in the dark.”
I started to speak, to offer some kind of reassurance to her, but there are times when words are of no value. I walked away and rejoined Helen and the other members of my department, all of whom were dealing with problems that were both tangible and transitory.
When I looked for Clete Purcel, I could not see him in the crowd.
Chapter 8
OTIS BAYLOR WAS proud of the way his home had withstood the storm. Built of oak and cypress, with twin brick chimneys, by a clipper-ship captain who would later fight at the side of the Confederate admiral Raphael Semmes, the house lost no glass behind its latched shutters and developed no leaks in the ceilings, even though oak limbs weighing hundreds of pounds had crashed down on the roof. Otis’s neighbors were without power or telephone communication as the hurricane’s center plowed northward into Mississippi, but Otis’s generators worked beautifully and lit up his home with the soft pink-white radiance of a birthday cake.
By midday Tuesday he was clearing his drive of broken tree limbs, lopping them into segments with his chain saw, preparing to get his car out of the carriage house and make contact with his company’s 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 him. He couldn’t remember when she had been so confessional in her need, so dependent upon his strength. “Put the rifle in our bedroom. I know you have it. I saw you with it the other day.”
“I’ll keep it close by. I promise.”
She let out her breath and rested her cheek against his shoulder. In ten seconds’ time the embittered woman he had been living with had disappeared and been replaced by the lovely, intelligent woman he had met on a Bahamian beach, under the stars, years ago.
Otis waited until Melanie and Thelma were setting the dining room table, then removed a pair of binoculars from his desk in the den and focused them on the men who were breaking into homes on the other side of the neutral ground. Tom Claggart tapped on the side window. Otis unlocked the French doors and pulled them open.
“What is it?” he asked.
“The Snoop Dogg fan club is looting the goddamn neighborhood is what,” Tom said.
“What do you want me to do about it?”
Tom Claggart’s shaved head was pinpointed with sweat in the humidity, his muscle shirt streaked with dirt. “We need to take back our fucking neighborhood. You want in or not?”
“What I want is for you not to use that kind of language around my home.”
“Those guys out there file their teeth, Otis. Considering what happened to Thelma, you of all people should know that.”
“If they try to come in my home, I’ll kill them. So far they haven’t tried to do that. Now go back to your family, Tom.”
“My family left.” Tom’s face was flat when he said it, his buckshot eyes round and dead, as though he were announcing a fact he himself had not yet assimilated.
“I’m sorry. I can’t help you,” Otis said.
Otis closed the French doors and locked them. As he looked at Tom’s expression through the glass, he felt a deep sense of sorrow for him, the same way he had once felt toward his uneducated, work-exhausted father whose sense of self-worth was so low he had to put on a Klansman’s robes to know who he was.
“Who was that?” Thelma asked.
“A fellow who will never own anything of value,” Otis said.
“What’s that mean?” Thelma asked.
“It means let’s eat,” Otis said, patting her fondly on the back.
But a few minutes later Otis Baylor realized he had arrived at one of those intersections in life when a seemingly inconsequential decision or event changes one’s direction forever. He had forgotten to return the binoculars to the desk drawer and in the fading twilight Thelma had picked them up and begun scanning the street
