The Tin Roof Blowdown (Dave Robicheaux 16)

“You okay?” I said.

“I got ulcers.”

“And you’re eating boudin and drinking alcohol?”

“Lookie, what if I leave most everything for you in a bag, maybe I just hold back a lI’l, and you give it to Mr. Kovick?”

“Where did the shot come from?”

He swallowed, disconcerted, angry over his powerlessness and the fact that I kept redirecting the conversation. “I ain’t seen it. I just heard it and saw Eddy go down.”

“You know what bothers me here, Bertrand? You make no mention of Kevin Rochon. He was seventeen. He was the only one among y’all without a sheet. He got his brains blown out and all you can talk about is yourself and your brother.”

“We tole Andre not to bring him. It ain’t our fault. Why you keep getting on my case?”

“You boosted a boat in the Lower Nine, didn’t you?”

I saw his fingers splay on his stomach again, his mouth hang open as a rush of pain flared into his bowels and rectum. “I cain’t take this. I wish it had been me instead of Kevin or Eddy. I just want to get my brother back. I just want out.”

He wasn’t acting. I genuinely believed that Bertrand Melancon had taken up residence in a place that does not have geographical boundaries, one that we associate with mythology and outmoded religions.

“If I were you, I’d ship Kovick’s goods to his flower store in Algiers. With luck, he’ll turn your brother loose and he won’t come after you.”

I tried to hold my eyes on his and not blink, but he read the lie in them.

“I’m dead, ain’t I?”

“Tell me what you did to the priest in the Lower Nine.”

“That fat cracker said you was straight up. But you ain’t no different from me. You working the angle, running the con, trying to make me sick and afraid so you can get what you want. The people glowed under the water. That’s what happened out there, man. Won’t nobody believe that. But I seen it. I hope I end up wit’ them. Maybe you gonna feel like that one day, too, motherfucker.”

He clutched his boudin inside the wax paper it had been heated in and took it with him out the door. I unscrewed the cap from the bottle of carbonated water and drank from the neck. I wondered at the ease with which I had just gone about dismembering an impaired man. The club was stone-quiet. I could hear the carbonation bubbling inside the bottle in my hand.

MOLLY WAS ASLEEP when I got home, her face turned toward the wall, her hip rounded under the sheet. I lay my shirt and trousers across the back of a chair, but I didn’t get in bed. Instead, I sat on the floor, in my skivvies, inside a box of slatted moonlight, my spine against the bed frame. I sat there for a long time, but I cannot tell you exactly why. Outside, I could hear the drawbridge clanking at Burke Street and the droning of a deep-draft workboat laboring down the bayou.

“What are you doing down there?” Molly said above me.

“I didn’t want to wake you up.”

I could hear her moving herself across the mattress so she could see me better. “You’re not going crazy on me, are you?”

She meant it as a joke.

“I have memories I can’t get rid of, no matter what I do,” I replied. “It’s like trying to self-exorcise a succubus. I don’t have your degree of spiritual conviction, Molly. I remember events that happened either yesterday or years ago, and I remember the bastards who caused them, and I want to go back in time and do them great injury. That’s not honest. I want to paint the wall with them.”

She lay on her stomach, propped on her elbows, her head hanging down close to mine. “You can’t confide in me? You don’t think we’re a partnership in dealing with whatever problems come down the road? Is that where we are in our marriage?”

She tapped a finger on my neck. “I asked you a question, trooper.”

“I just put the screws to a black kid in Jeanerette. He’s a street puke and meth dealer and maybe a rapist. But you don’t rip out their spokes when their wheels are already broken.”

Her face hovered on the side of my vision. I could smell the shampoo in her hair. She put one hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. “You never deliberately hurt an innocent person in your life, Dave,” she said. “You take on other people’s suffering without their ever asking. Your greatest virtue is your greatest weakness.”

I turned my head and looked into her face. Her mouth was pink, her skin shiny in the moonlight. She’d had her hair cut short so that it was thick and even on the ends where it hung down on her cheeks. One of her nightgown straps had pulled loose and I could see the spray of freckles on her shoulder. She walked her fingers through my hair. “Will you get off the floor, please?” she said.

I lay down beside her and pulled her against me. I could feel her breath against my ear. Her hands pressed me hard in the small of my back. She hooked a thumb in the elastic of my underwear and began to work the fabric down on my hip. Then she gave it up and let me undress by myself while she pulled off her panties and nightgown. I started to get on top of her, but she pushed me back and sat on my thighs, her arms propped by my shoulders. She stared down at me in a way I didn’t understand. “I don’t know what I would do if anything happened to you, Dave. I never thought I would feel that way about a man. But I do about you,” she said.