with them.
She froze and a muted sound rose from her throat, as though she had stepped on a sharp stone.
“What’s wrong, kiddo?” he asked.
“Those guys in the boat,” she replied.
“They’ll take what they want and they’ll go away. They won’t come here.”
“No, it’s them, Daddy.”
He took the binoculars from her and fixed them on the four black males who had now worked their way farther down the street, still on the opposite side of the neutral ground. “Those are the men who attacked you?” he said.
“The one in the front of the boat is for sure. He kept lighting cigarettes and laughing while they did it to me,” she said. “The guy behind him, the one with the hammer in his hand, he looks just like the guy who-”
“What?”
Her face was beginning to crumple now. “Who made me put it in my mouth,” she said.
Otis cleared his throat slightly, as though a tiny piece of bone were caught in it. He could feel his chest laboring for his next breath, his palms opening and closing at his sides, his mouth drier than he could remember. “You’re absolutely certain?”
“You don’t believe me? You think I would just pick out some black guys I never saw before and lie about them? Is that what you think of me?”
The pathos in her face was such he could hardly look at it.
He walked out on his front porch and stared down the street at the four men. Their boat was a big aluminum one, painted green, the black men and the green boat almost lost in the shadows of the building. He climbed the stairs to the second floor and in the hallway pulled down the lanyard on the collapsible steps that folded into the attic. His Springfield was propped against a cardboard box packed with his dead mother’s clothes, which he could not bring himself to give away. The rifle had been a present from his father on Otis’s sixteenth birthday and was the best gift Otis had ever received, primarily because his father had owned very little, not even the clapboard house in which they lived, and the most dear of his possessions had been his Springfield rifle.
It still had its original military dark-grained stock and leather sling and iron sights, but the oiled smoothness of its action and the accuracy with which it fired a round had no peer.
The attic was musty and dry, strangely comfortable and peaceful in the shadowy light of the single electric bulb that hung from a cord overhead. Otis unlocked the bolt and from a box of army-surplus ammunition began pressing one.30-06 shell after another into the rifle’s magazine. He felt the spring come tight under his thumb and slid the bolt forward, locking it down, a metal-jacketed, needle-nosed round resting snugly in the chamber.
He climbed back down the folding steps and walked through his bedroom to the glass doors that gave onto the balcony. But the sky was dark now, the stars and moon veiled with smoke, the tangle of downed trees on his neighbors’ lawns impossible to see through. He opened the doors onto the balcony and stepped outside, wrapping his left forearm inside the rifle’s sling. The warm current of air rising from his flower beds made him think of spring, of new beginnings, of seasonal predictability. But the autumnal gas on the wind was a more realistic indicator of his situation, he thought. It was a season of death, and for Otis it had begun not with the hurricane but with the rape of his daughter.
He had never tried to describe to others the rage he felt when he saw his daughter in the emergency room at Charity Hospital. Her attackers had even burned her breasts. A black policewoman had tried to console him, promising him that NOPD would do everything in its power to catch the men who had harmed Thelma. She said his daughter needed him. She said he should not have the thoughts he was having. She said he was a bystander now and that he must trust others to hunt down his daughter’s tormentors, that in effect the legalities of her case were not his business.
The look Otis gave the policewoman made her face twitch. From that moment on he resolved he would never allow anyone access to the level of rage that churned inside him, not until he found the three faceless black men who lived quietly on the edges of his consciousness, twenty-four hours a day.
Otis doubted that many people had any understanding of the thought processes, the obsession, a father enters into when he wakes each morning with the knowledge that the degenerates and cowards who ruined his daughter’s life are probably within a few miles of his house, laughing at what they have done. Perhaps the father’s emotions are atavistic in origin, he told himself, just as protection of the cave is. Perhaps those feelings are hardwired into the brain for a reason and are not to be contended with.
After Thelma was arrested for possession of marijuana, Otis attended several Al-Anon meetings in the Garden District. The only other man there as reticent as he was a neatly groomed accountant who worked for a religious foundation. For five meetings the accountant sat politely in a chair and never volunteered a word. One night the group leader asked the accountant if the meetings had helped him or his alcoholic wife. The accountant seemed to consider the question for a moment. “When my daughter was raped by her teacher on a field trip I thought about laundering ten thousand dollars to have him castrated. But I still haven’t decided if that’s the right thing or not. So, yeah, I guess in a way you could say I’ve made some progress.”
The room was so quiet Otis thought all the air had been sucked out of it. After the meeting, he followed the accountant to his car. It had just rained and the night air was pungent with the smell of magnolia blossoms, pulsing with the sounds of tree frogs.
“Hey?” Otis said.
“Yeah?” the accountant said.
“Have a good one, bud,” Otis said.
“You trying to tell me something?” the accountant said.
“I just did,” Otis replied.
Now he was walking downstairs with a loaded rifle cradled against his chest. He could hear Thelma talking to Melanie in the kitchen, telling her she was sure that at least two of the men in the green boat were her attackers. Then she began to tell Melanie for the first time, in detail, what they had done to her.
Otis stepped out on the mushiness of the St. Augustine grass that grew like a deep blue-green carpet on his lawn. Four houses down the street, on the opposite side, he could see a flashlight’s beam moving behind the second-story windows of a home where Varina Davis, the wife of the Confederate president, had once stayed. But he didn’t see the green boat and he wondered if he was watching the same vandals or a new group. He crossed Tom Claggart’s yard, walking on the dirty rim of water that covered the sidewalk and extended almost to Tom’s gallery. Suddenly he was bathed in white light from a battery-powered lantern that Tom had chosen, just at that moment, to carry out on the gallery.
“Turn that thing off!” Otis said.
“You got those guys spotted?” Tom asked.
“I’m not sure. Go back inside, Tom.”
“I got some guys coming over. We can close off the block and rip the whole problem out by its roots. Get my drift?”
“No, I didn’t.”
Tom clicked off his lantern. “Bang on the door if you need the cavalry,” he said. “My friends don’t take prisoners.”
Otis sloshed into the street until his foot touched the curbing that bordered the neutral ground. But even on top of the neutral ground the water level was above his ankles and he could see the V-shaped wake of a cottonmouth moccasin swimming toward a mound of oak limbs that was draped over an automobile.
He positioned himself behind the trunk of a palm tree and stared at the house from which he could hear glass breaking and furniture being overturned. In his mind’s eye he saw himself crashing through the front door, advancing up the stairs, and taking them out one by one, the exit wounds stippling the wallpaper with their blood, the impact of their bodies hitting the floor like bags of sand.
No, it had to be an eye for an eye, he thought. Thelma had identified only two of the four men as her attackers. He could not kill arbitrarily, if in fact he was capable of killing at all. It was easier to think about than to do it. When the test came, could he pull the trigger? Was he willing to join the ranks of men like Tom Claggart and his friends?
But if the looters threatened him, if they were armed or they refused to halt, that would be another matter, wouldn’t it?
