maybe I was going to kill him.”
“You make me sad when you talk like that.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not who you are.”
Otis didn’t reply and kept his thoughts to himself, lest his daughter see a side to his personality that even he feared.
He was amazed at how easy it was to find the house owned by Bertrand Melancon’s aunt. Someone had propped up the mailbox in the front yard and raked the mud off the numbers, even though there would probably be no postal delivery in the Ninth Ward for months, if ever. The yard was stacked with virtually everything the house had once contained: cloth-covered chairs and a sofa, a refrigerator, mattresses, bedsprings, a television set, clothes, food, a chest of drawers with flower decals pasted all over it, stripped wallpaper and carpeting, all of it caked with a greenish-black sludge that had dried like plastic. The windows of the house were tacked over with plywood, a screen in place on the entrance. In the driveway, on the side of the house, a young black man and an older black woman in a dress that hung on her like a sack were sitting on hard chairs by a fire burning in a ventilated oil drum.
Neither one of them looked up when Otis approached them. Six slices of white bread, with pieces of cheese on them, were browning on a refrigerator grill above the fire.
“You know who I am?” Otis asked.
Bertrand raised his eyes and lowered them again. Then he looked at the car parked on the street and the young woman in the passenger seat. “Yes, suh, I ain’t got no doubt who you are.”
“Who are you, ma’am?” Otis asked the woman.
“Who are you, standing in my drive, axing questions?” she said. Her skin was as wrinkled as old putty, her breasts nothing more than dried dugs. Her movement was erratic, as though her motor control would not coordinate with itself. One of her eyelids drooped. Her hair was so thin it looked like duck down on her scalp.
“My name is Otis Baylor. The young woman in the car is my daughter. Her name is Thelma. I suspect you’re Miss Clemmie, Bertrand’s auntie.”
The woman watched the cheese melt on the bread slices. She picked up a tin can from her lap, bent over, and spit snuff in it.
“Did Bertrand tell you what happened to my daughter, Miss Clemmie?”
“She ain’t part of this, suh,” Bertrand said.
“You’re staying at her house. She’s giving your refuge. That makes her part of it. Where’s your grandmother?”
“Inside, resting. It’s cool tonight. She t’ought she’d rest.”
“Mr. Robicheaux says you came to my house and tried to make amends. How does a man like you make amends for what he did, Mr. Melancon?”
“I wanted to give y’all some diamonds I taken from a man who taken them from somebody else.”
“That’s an insult.”
“Suh, I ain’t mean to hurt y’all no more. I t’ought I was-” He stopped and widened his eyes, as though smoke were in them. “I ain’t gonna say no more. Call the cops or do what you come here to do.”
Otis wore a short-sleeved shirt that suddenly seemed too small for his chest and throat, so small and tight he couldn’t breathe. “You wait here,” he said.
He went inside the house without knocking. It was dark inside and he could hear the hum of mosquitoes in the rooms. The floor and walls seemed to be covered with the same greenish-black sludge or mold that he had seen on the debris piled in the yard. A woman lay on a cot in the hallway, breathing audibly, a pillow stuffed behind her head. “That you, Bertrand?” she said.
“No, my name is Otis Baylor.”
There were bandages wrapped around the palms of both the woman’s hands. “Where’s Bertrand at?” she said.
“Outside, in the driveway,” Otis said.
“You one of the men shot into my li’l house?”
“No.”
“You a policeman?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Then what you doing here?”
“I’m an insurance man.”
“You come here about Clemmie’s claim?”
“No, I didn’t,” he said.
“Would you help me up?”
Otis reached down to take her by the arm. Then he heard the screen door behind him. “That’s all right, suh. I got it,” Bertrand said. He held a small white bowl in one hand. “She burned herself on the grill. I got to help her with her soup.”
“These women shouldn’t be here,” Otis said.
“Ain’t no place to take them,” Bertrand said.
Otis watched while Bertrand hand-fed his grandmother. Otis wiped the mosquitoes out of his face. When the wind changed and blew through the back door, the odor of feces struck his nostrils. “I want to talk to you,” he said.
“I got to finish here,” Bertrand said.
“No, you come outside and talk to me now.”
Bertrand set the bowl down on the floor, next to the cot, and followed Otis outside.
“I feel like tearing you apart,” Otis said.
“I guess you do.”
“You go over to that car and you apologize.”
“Suh?”
“You heard me. You look my daughter in the face and you apologize, you sonofabitch, before I do something awful.”
Bertrand walked to Otis’s car and stood in front of the passenger door, his back to Otis, blocking Otis’s view of his daughter’s face. While he spoke, Bertrand’s arms were folded on his chest, his head turned to one side. In silhouette, his body looked like it had no arms, like a wood post painted on the air. On the far side of the street, a dog was trying to dig something loose from a pile of smoldering garbage.
Bertrand turned away from the car and walked past Otis toward the front door of the house. He was wiping his nose with the back of his wrist.
“You come here,” Otis said.
“What for?”
“Did you hear me?” Otis said. He fitted his hand under Bertrand’s arm, almost lifting him into the air.
“What you want from me? I done all I could do,” Bertrand said. “If them men who killed Andre and tortured Eddy get their hands on my auntie and grandmother, what you think is gonna happen to them? You tell me that, Mr. Baylor.”
The question Bertrand had asked was legitimate: What did Otis want? To somehow give new life to the spiritual cancer that had fed at his father’s heart? To use his daughter’s suffering to justify beating a man bloody with his fists?
“Daddy?” he heard Thelma say behind him.
He turned and stared into her face.
“Daddy, it’s all right. Let him go,” she said.
“Honey-” he began.
“I’m all right,” she said. “Let’s go home.”
She took his big hand in both of hers and smiled at him. “Come on, Daddy, we’re finished here,” she said.
Bertrand Melancon remained stationary in the yard as they drove away. He was not sure what had happened between Otis Baylor and his daughter or what he should do next. In fact, he was not sure about anything. He
