The Tin Roof Blowdown (Dave Robicheaux 16)

“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.”