this.
The room was silent a long time. When he lay back down, Melanie took his hand in hers. “Otis?” she said, looking up into the darkness.
“Yes?”
“We mustn’t ever tell anyone about this. That is not what happened in your family.”
In the glow of moonlight through the window, her face looked as though it had been sculpted in alabaster.
“Say that again?” Otis asked.
“You’re a respected insurance executive in New Orleans. That’s what you will remain. That story you just told me has no application in our lives today.”
“Mel?” he began.
“Please. I’ve told you not to call me that, Otis. It’s not a lot to ask.”
Otis went downstairs to the den and lay down on a black leather couch, a cushion over his head, his ears ringing with a sound like wind in seashells.
BERTRAND COULDN’T give up his resentment toward Eddy all the way back to the house where he’d found the cash and dope and the.38 snub. Eddy loved playing the big shot, handing out favors to people, screwing a cigarette in his mouth, firing it up with a Zippo, snapping the lid back tight, like he was the dude in control. Except Eddy was being generous with what wasn’t his to be generous with, in this case the biggest score of their lives. Andre was sitting backward on the bow of the boat, like he was lookout man, scanning the horizon, some kind of commando about to take down osama bin Laden.
What a pair of jokers. Maybe it was time to cut both of them loose.
But the real reason for Bertrand’s resentment of Eddy and Andre had little to do with the score at the house and he knew it. Every time he looked into their faces he saw his own face, and what he saw there set his stomach on fire again.
Maybe he could get away from Andre and Eddy and start over somewhere else. Forget about what they had done when they were stoned. Yeah, maybe he could even make up for it, write those girls a note and mail it to the newspaper from another city. It hadn’t been his idea anyway. It was Eddy who always had a thing about young white girls, always saying sick stuff when they pulled up to them next to a red light. Andre had been a sex freak ever since he got turned out in the Lafourche Parish Prison. Bertrand never got off hurting people.
But no matter how many times Bertrand went over the assault on the two victims, he could not escape one conclusion about his participation: He had entered into it willingly, and when he saw revulsion in the face of the girl they had taken out of the car with the dead battery, he had done it to her with greater violence than either his brother or Andre.
In these moments he hated himself and sometimes even wished someone would drive a bullet through his brain and stop the thoughts that kept his stomach on fire.
The street was completely dark, except for one house where the owner obviously had his own generators working. Eddy cut the engine at the end of the block and let the boat drift through mounds of partially submerged oak limbs into the side yard of the house they had creeped three hours earlier.
In minutes the four of them were ripping the Sheetrock and lathwork and plaster off the studs in every room in the house. In fact, it was fun tearing the place apart. The air and carpets were white with dust, the flower vases smashed and the flowers scattered, the kitchen a shambles, electric wiring hanging like spaghetti out of the walls.
“This motherfucker gonna brown his drawers when he come home,” Eddy said. “Hey, man, dig Andre in the kitchen.”
Bertrand couldn’t believe it. Andre had unbuttoned his trousers and was looping a high arc of urine into the sink.
“That’s sick, man,” Bertrand said.
“You’re right,” Andre answered. He spun around and hosed down the stove and an opened drawer that was full of seasoning, saving out enough for the icebox.
That was it, Bertrand said to himself. He was splitting.
Then Eddy splintered a chunk of plywood out of the pantry ceiling with his crowbar, and a cascade of bundled fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills poured down on his head. “Oh man, you was right from the jump, Bertrand, this is a motherfucking bank.”
The four of them began scooping up the money, throwing it into a vinyl garbage bag, Bertrand estimating the count as each pack of bills thudded into the bottom of the bag. He ran out of math in the sixty-thousand range.
“We rich,” Andre said. “We rich, man. We rich. Ain’t nobody gonna believe this.”
“That’s right, ’Cause you ain’t gonna tell them,” Bertrand said.
“Hey, man, Andre’s cool. Don’t be talking to a brother like that,” Eddy said.
“Eddy, I want you to clean the wax out of your ears and hear this real good. That’s the last time you’re gonna act like you big shit at my expense,” Bertrand said.
“Hey, like Andre say, we all rich. We ain’t got time to be fighting among ourselves,” Kevin said. “We gonna burn the house? I mean, to get rid of the fingerprints and all?”
The three older men stared at him with their mouths open.
UP THE STREET, on the other side of the neutral ground, Tom Claggart and two friends had nodded off on pallets they had laid out on Claggart’s living room floor, hoping to catch the faint breeze that puffed through the doorway and to avoid as much as possible the layers of heat that had mushroomed against the ceilings. Their pistols and shotguns and hunting rifles were oiled and loaded and propped against the divan or hung on the backs of chairs. Their boxes of brass cartridges and shotgun shells were placed neatly on the mantel above the fireplace. All their empty beer cans and bread wrappers and empty containers of corn beef and boneless turkey and mustard and horseradish and dirty paper plates and plastic forks and spoons were wrapped and sealed in odor-proof bags. When one of them had to relieve himself, he did so in the backyard and took an entrenching tool with him.
No hunting camp could have been neater or better regulated. There was only one problem. Tom Claggart and his friends had not been presented with an opportunity to discharge a round all night, even though they and several others had made probes by boat and on foot into two adjoining neighborhoods where sparks from burning houses drifted through the live oaks like fireflies.
It seemed hardly fair.
“DON’T GO BACK by that lighted house, man. Go back the way we come,” Bertrand said from the bow of the boat.
“No, man, we’re hauling ass. We ain’t bothered them people. They ain’t gonna bother us,” Eddy said, sitting sideways in the stern, opening up the throttle.
“You just don’t listen, man,” Bertrand said, his words lost in the roar of the engine.
The boat swerved through clumps of broken tree limbs in the street and raked on the curbing along the neutral ground. Andre was laughing, sticking his hand down in the vinyl bag to feel the tightly packed bundles of cash there, his nephew eating one of the candy bars he’d found in the Rite Aid. The wind had cleared the smoke off the street, and the water was black, stained with a rainbow slick, a busted main pumping a geyser in the air like a fountain in the park. If Bertrand got out of this with his share of the score intact, he was leaving New Orleans forever, starting over in a new place, maybe out on the West Coast, where people lived in regular neighborhoods, with parks and beaches and nice supermarkets close by. Yeah, a place where it was always seventy-five degrees and he could open a restaurant or a car wash with the money from the score and tool down palm-lined avenues in a brand-new convertible, Three 6 Mafia blaring from the speakers.
Yeah, that was the way it was going to be.
The motor coughed once, sputtered, and died. The boat rose on its wake and glided into a fallen oak limb, the branches scratching loudly against the aluminum sides. Bertrand could feel his skin shrink on his face, his ears popping in the silence. “I don’t believe it,” he said.
“It’s out of gas. It ain’t my fault,” Eddy said.
