information about Melanie’s past has only made Otis more confused. Melanie is rigidly abstemious, and Otis does not understand how her former husband’s behavior could account for her unpredictable mood swings today.
But the transformation in Melanie that was most difficult for Otis to accept took place after the attack upon Thelma. Each evening she began to show fatigue and complained of nausea and insisted on talking about nonexistent problems with their finances. He could feel her back constrict when he touched her in bed. On Saturday and Sunday mornings she awoke an hour earlier than he and went downstairs and into her day’s schedule, effectively neutralizing any romantic overture on his part.
On one occasion, unbeknown to her, he glimpsed her picking his clothes off the back of a chair, smelling them, then flinging them with disgust into a dirty clothes hamper.
Now, as the worst storm in Louisiana ’s history approaches the city, he wonders if she blames him for the assault upon his daughter. Is that the reason behind her irritability and her implicit criticism of whatever he does? Does she no longer think of him as protector of his family?
“I’m going to the club for a workout. Want to come?” he says.
“Now? Are you serious?”
“My daddy used to always say, ‘Respect Mother Nature, but nail down the shutters and don’t let her scare you.’”
She can hardly hide her ennui at his mention of his sawmill-employee father who went to the ninth grade. “Take Thelma with you,” she says.
“She doesn’t like the club.”
Melanie makes no reply and begins pulling dishes from the dishwasher and putting them away loudly in the cabinets.
“What is it? Why do I make you angry?” he says.
She seems to teeter on a direct answer to his question, her eyes charged with light. Then the moment passes. “I’m not angry. I just don’t think it’s good for Thelma to stay in her room all the time. Maybe she should think about getting a job,” she says.
But secretly Otis has always suspected that his wife is like many Northerners. She likes people of color collectively and as an abstraction. But she doesn’t feel comfortable with them individually. It’s been obvious from the night of the attack that she doesn’t want her friends to know her stepdaughter has been the victim of black rapists.
“You think I let Thelma down somehow?” he asks.
She examines her hands over the sink, feeling the bones in them, the joints of her fingers. She has begun to complain of arthritis, although she has not seen a doctor for at least a year. She looks at the rain beating on the philodendron and the banana trees and windmill palms in the side yard.
“Why did you let her go to the prom with an idiot who doesn’t know how to wash the dandruff out of his hair, much less protect his date from a bunch of animals?” she says.
“You never made any mistakes when you were that age?” he replies.
“Of that magnitude? No, I had to wait until I was a mature woman to do that,” she says.
He slings his workout bag over his shoulder and goes down the covered walk to the carriage house and backs his car under the canopy of oaks and into the street, knocking the trash can into the hedge. Melanie’s last statement to him is one he knows he will never be able to scrub out of his memory, no matter what form of amends or atonement, if any, she ever tries to make.
That thought is like a cold vapor wrapped around his heart, and briefly the avenue and windswept neutral ground and the scrolled purple and pink neon tubing on the corner drugstore go out of focus.
THE HEALTH CLUB is almost empty, the basketball court echoing with the sounds of a solitary shooter bouncing shots off a steel rim. The shooter is Otis’s neighbor, Tom Claggart, an export-import man who flies in a private plane with business friends to western game farms, where they shoot animals that are released from either cages or penned areas shortly before the hunters’ arrival. Tom has told Otis, with a lascivious wink, that he and his friends also land at a private airstrip not far from a brothel outside Vegas.
“Got her battened down?” he says, the basketball grasped between his palms.
“Pretty much,” Otis says.
Tom’s torso is as solid as a cypress stump, his head bullet-shaped. Each week a barber clips his mustache, which is threaded with white, and lathers his scalp and shaves it with a straight-edged razor.
“I think after landfall we’re gonna have monkey shit flying through the fan,” Tom says.
“I don’t know as I follow you,” Otis replies.
“The black Irish get restive after natural disasters.” Tom is smiling now, as though the two of them share a private knowledge.
“I guess we’ll find out,” Otis replies.
Tom flings his basketball down the court and watches it bounce and roll across the maple boards into the shadows. The windows high up on the walls are streaked with rain, whipped by the branches of trees. His face becomes thoughtful. “I’ve never talked to you about this before, but my sister-in-law told me what happened to your daughter. They ever catch those guys?”
“Not yet.”
“That’s a shame. If they didn’t catch them by now, they probably won’t.”
“I couldn’t say,” Otis replies.
“You own a gun?”
“Why?”
“Come Monday, those bastards are gonna be swarming all over the neighborhood. If I were you, I’d stop jerking on my dork and smell the coffee.”
“What makes you think you can talk to me like that?”
“Just speaking to you as a neighbor and a friend.”
“Don’t.”
“This isn’t like you, Otis.”
That’s what you think, you idiot, Otis says to himself, and is surprised by the virulence of his own thoughts.
Chapter 4
IT’S SATURDAY EVENING and long lines of automobiles are streaming out of New Orleans, northbound on Interstate 10, although rumors have already spread that there is not a motel room available all the way to St. Louis, Missouri.
But for the glad of heart, life goes on full-throttle in the French Quarter. In a corner bar off Ursulines, one in which Christmas lights never come down, Clete Purcel has positioned himself at a window so he can watch a shuttered cottage across the street, in front of which a black male is smoking a cigarette in an illegally parked panel truck. The rain has stopped and the air is unnaturally green and contains the dense, heavy odor of the Gulf. There is even a rip of bone-white light in the clouds, as though the evening sunset is about to resume. The black male in the panel truck is talking on a cell phone and blowing his cigarette smoke out the window, where it seems to hang in the air like damp cotton. Then he twists his head and stares at the bar, and for a moment Clete thinks he has been made.
But the black man is watching a woman in spiked heels and skintight shorts walking rapidly down the sidewalk, her sequined, fringed purse swinging back on her rump. The owner of the bar is opening all the doors, filling the interior with a bloom of fresh air that smells of brine and wet trees. The revelers inside react as though a bad moment in their lives has come and gone.
“You want another drink? It’s on the house,” the owner says.
“I look like I can’t pay for my drinks?” Clete says.
“No, you look like you got the heebie-jeebies. Maybe you ought to get yourself laid.”
Clete gives the owner a look, one that makes the owner’s eyes shift off Clete’s face. The owner is Jimmy
