“All right,” he said, drawing a quiet breath.
“That’s better,” Eddy said. “You’re always grieving, man, firing yourself up over things you cain’t change. We ain’t made the world. Time to enjoy life, not worry so much all the time.”
Both of them went downstairs, the flashlight’s beam bouncing in front of them. Then Bertrand clicked off the light and the two of them climbed into the boat with Andre and his nephew. The sky was orange from a fire on the next block and inside the smoke and mist and humidity the air smelled like garbage burning on a cold day at the City dump.
Bertrand looked back over his shoulder at the house. For some reason that he couldn’t understand, he felt his entry into this deserted, antebellum structure had just changed his life in a fashion that was irreversible. But for good or bad? Why were knives always whirling inside him?
Suddenly, like a camera shutter opening in his mind, he saw a young girl fighting against the polyethylene rope that bound her arms and ankles, thrashing her feet against the floor of a panel truck, her stuffed bear lying beside her. He shook the image out of his head and pointed his face into the wind as their aluminum boat sped down the flooded alleyway, trash cans bobbing in the engine’s wake, helicopters flying overhead to airlift the most desperate of the desperate from the hospital in which Bertrand Melancon had been born.
It was close to midnight before Otis dressed for bed. He removed the cartridge from the chamber of the Springfield, pressed it back down in the magazine, and locked down the bolt. He propped the rifle by a dormer window that gave an encompassing view of the front yard, checked all the doors again, and kissed Thelma good night. Then he made an old-fashioned for both himself and Melanie and took them up to the bedroom on a silver tray with three pieces of chocolate on it.
“What’s all this for?” she asked.
“We owe ourselves a treat. Tomorrow will be a fine day. I genuinely believe it will.”
She wore a pink nightgown and had been reading on top of the sheets. The gasoline-powered generators could not adequately support the air-conditioning system, but the attic fan was on and her bare shoulders looked cool and lovely in the breeze through the window. She placed her book on the floor and bit into a square of French chocolate, pushing little pieces of it back into her mouth with her fingertips. She smiled at him. “Turn out the light,” she said.
Later, when Otis fell asleep, his thoughts were peaceful, his body drained of all the rage and turmoil that had beset his life since his daughter was attacked. His home had survived Katrina. His wife was his wife again. And he had gone after his daughter’s attackers with both firmness of purpose and a measure of mercy. More important, he had made his house a safe harbor in a time of societal collapse, the front yard and driveway pooled with an apron of light that held back the darkness and the men who prowled it. A man could have done worse.
INSIDE THE BACK of the looted Rite Aid drugstore, Bertrand Melancon felt like fire ants were eating the lining of his stomach. Andre and his nephew still didn’t know about the bundled cash in the laundry bag, but it was only a matter of time before they either saw it or figured out why Eddy was acting hinky. Maybe it was better to split the loot fair and square and be done with it, he thought. The Rite Aid had been ripped apart and was in complete darkness, but it was a good place to cool out, do a few lines of the high-grade flake from the house full of flowers, and work things out. Yeah, that was it. Don’t stiff nobody and you don’t got to be watching your back all the time. But dividing up cold cash that he found, that he ripped out of the wall, wasn’t going to be easy. On several levels, personal and otherwise.
“Look, me and Eddy got a surprise for you. That last house had some money in a wall. We’re gonna give y’all your cut now, in case something go sout’ and some of us get picked up,” Bertrand said.
There was no sound in the room. Andre was seated on a metal desk, drinking from a warm can of Coca-Cola he’d found under a destroyed display rack out front. He had thrown away his soiled LSU T-shirt and in the flashes of heat lightning through the window his skin was the color of dusty leather, his nipples like brown dimes. “How come we just hearing about that now?” he asked.
Bertrand slapped a mosquito on his neck and studied it. “’Cause I didn’t want no complications back there,” he said. “’Cause I don’t be explaining everything as we go. ’Cause you getting cut in on what you ain’t found, Andre, wit’ an equal share for your young relative here, even though you and him ain’t had nothing to do wit’ finding the money. If I was you, I’d show some humbleness and be thankful for what I got.”
“The split’s always been fair, ain’t it?” Eddy said.
“If it ain’t been fair, I wouldn’t have no way of knowing, would I?” Andre said.
But Bertrand no longer cared if Andre believed him and Eddy or not. That house back there on the flooded alley was creaking with cash-ola. Ten more minutes with the ball-peen and the crowbar and he would have had the upstairs walls peeled down to the floor. Bertrand could see stacks of cash tumbling out on his shoe tops.
He looked at his watch. It was one in the morning. He and Eddy could be at the alley in less than a half hour, cut the engine, and hand-pull the boat in from the side street. Nobody would even know they were there. Because they already knew the layout they could probably work inside without flashlights. This was the big score, man. He’d done right by Andre and his nephew and it was time to get back into action. Screw this diplomacy shit.
“Me and Eddy are going back. Y’all stay here,” Bertrand said.
Andre pinched his abs, his eyes empty, his mouth pursed. “How come we get left behind?”
“Let me ax you a better question,” Bertrand said. “How come you always feeling yourself up?”
“Why don’t you lay off me, man? Case you ain’t noticed, the buses and the streetcar ain’t running,” Andre said. “We suppose to carry our loot t’rou town?”
“Andre’s right, man. One for all and all for one. We all going back together,” Eddy said. He lit a cigarette and blew out smoke without removing the cigarette from his lips. He looked at Andre’s nephew. “You up for that, my li’l brother?”
Kevin was seated on the floor, eating a fried pie, his springy hair bright with sweat. He wiped his mouth with his shirt. “I ain’t scared,” he said.
Bertrand wanted to shove Eddy’s head into a commode.
OTIS SLEPT THE sleep of the dead, his wife’s hip nestled against him, the attic fan drawing a breeze across their bodies. He dreamed of his parents and the tiny yellow house he had grown up in. In the spring the grass was always cool in the evening and full of clover, and when his father came home from work at the sawmill, they played a game of pitch-and-catch in the front yard. There were cows and horses in a field behind the house, and a big hackberry tree in the side yard that shaded the roof during the hottest hours of the day. Otis had always loved the house he had grown up in and he had loved his family and had always believed he was loved by them in return.
He believed this right up to the Indian-summer afternoon his father discovered his wife’s infidelity and shot her lover to death on the steps of the Baptist church where he served as pastor, then came home and was shot down and killed by a volunteer constable who had once been his fishing partner.
Otis sat straight up in bed. Then he went into the bathroom and tried to wash his face in the lavatory. The faucet made a loud, squeaking sound, and a pipe vibrated dryly in the wall.
“What was that?” Melanie said from the bed.
“It’s just me. I forgot the water was off.”
“I thought I heard something outside.”
He walked back into the bedroom, his bare feet padding on the carpet. All he could hear was the steady drone of the attic fan and the wind in the trees on the north side of the house. He looked out on the street. The moon had broken out of the clouds and created a black glaze on the surface of the floodwater. A solitary palm frond rustled against the side of a tree trunk on the neutral ground and a trash can turned in an eddy by a plugged storm drain.
“I had a bad dream. I was probably talking in my sleep,” he said.
“Are you sure no one is out there?”
“I never told you how my father died.”
She raised herself on her elbow, her face lined from the pillow. “I thought he had leukemia.”
“He did. But that’s not how he died. He was shot to death by a friend of his, a constable. He was going to kill my mother,” Otis said. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring into space, his back to his wife, when he said
