The Tin Roof Blowdown (Dave Robicheaux 16)

There was only one hitch in his desire to redeem himself: how was he supposed to do it?

He could write a letter of apology and tell the Baylors where to find the stones and leave it in their mailbox or under a door. But even as he started composing the sentences in his mind, he knew his prescription for his own redemption was too easy. He was going to have to look Thelma Baylor and her family in the face. That image, particularly when it came to looking the father in the face, made sweat break on his brow.

Why was everything so hard?

His first morning in the Loreauville Quarters he borrowed his grandmother’s car, a rusted-out hulk that oozed oil smoke from under the frame, and headed down the bayou toward New Iberia. The cane fields were wet and fog rolled off the bayou on the horse barns and spacious homes and oak-lined driveways of the people who were actually his neighbors, although they would never look upon him as such. He continued on down the state road into New Iberia and turned toward Jeanerette and the house where Thelma Baylor lived. He passed through both rural slums and immaculate acreage owned by the Louisiana State University agricultural school. He drove alongside rain ditches that were layered with trash and clumps of simple homes inside pecan trees. He passed a graveyard filled with crypts that reminded him of the cemeteries across from the New Orleans French Quarter.

But no matter what he looked at, he could not escape the fear that was like a cancerous tuber rooted in his chest. He tried every way possible to rationalize not confronting Thelma or her family directly. Wasn’t it enough simply to give them an amount of money that was probably beyond their wildest dreams? Wasn’t it enough that he was sorry, that his own health had been ruined, perhaps even his life made forfeit? How much was one guy supposed to suffer?

But besides his guilt over Thelma Baylor and the priest on the church roof and the young girl in the Lower Nine, he had another burden to carry. He had not only been slapped in Sidney Kovick’s flower store and had his pistol taken away from him by an unarmed man, he had proved himself a coward and had been treated as such, kicked between the buttocks, like a punk or a yard bitch, in view of passersby at the end of the alley.

He passed an eighteenth-century plantation home built of brick and saw a modest green house with a screened-in gallery ensconced inside shade trees. The numbers on the mailbox were the same as the ones he had gotten out of his grandmother’s directory. He drove to the drawbridge over the bayou, looking straight ahead in case anyone was watching. He rumbled across the bridge and turned his car around so he could have a full view of the Baylor house without anyone taking note of his interest. A light was on in the kitchen and steam was rising from the tin roof where the sunlight touched it. What if he just knocked on the door and announced who he was? If they wanted to shoot him, they could shoot him. If they wanted to have him busted, they could dial 911. What could be worse than watching his insides transformed into dissolving red clots in the toilet bowl?

He stayed parked for perhaps five minutes on the road’s shoulder, just on the other side of the bridge, blue oil smoke seeping through the floorboards. There was little traffic across the bridge this time of day. But when he glanced in the rearview mirror, he saw a white man who had an elongated, waxed head and indented face standing in front of a café, looking about innocuously, as a tourist might. When Bertrand glanced in the mirror a second time, the man was gone.

He shifted his grandmother’s car into gear and crawled across the bridge, turning back onto the state road that led past enormous plantation homes and the green one-story house of the girl he had raped and tormented. He slowed his car in the shadows across from the house and shifted the transmission into park. His head was spinning, either from his fear or the oil smoke rising through the floor. Then he had an idea. What if he wrote out the words he needed to say, and walked up to the door and knocked? In his mind, he saw Thelma Baylor and her father and mother answer his knock in unison, anxious for his apology, as though it were what they had waited for ever since the night she was taken into the hospital by paramedics.

Yeah, man, just read the statement and put the piece of paper in their hands and get in my grandmother’s lI’l car and rocket on down the road, he told himself.

He found a brown paper hand towel on the floor and a magazine on the seat. He flattened the hand towel on the magazine, propped the magazine on the steering wheel, and began to print with a ballpoint pen:

To Miss Thelma and the family of Miss Thelma,

I am sorrie for what I have did to her. I wasn’t alweys that kind of person. Or maybe I was. I am not sure. But I want to make it right even tho I know it is not going to ever be right with her or anybody who was hurt like she been hurt.

He paused, his heart beating, and looked at what he had written. For some reason, the words made him feel better than he had felt in a long time. Behind him, he heard the sound of tires rumbling over the drawbridge and automatically he looked in the rearview mirror. A truck had just crossed the bridge and turned down the bayou, in the opposite direction from Bertrand. But it was not the truck that got his attention. The white man with the long head and indented face had parked a gleaming blue Mercury under shade trees in front of a historical plantation house on the corner. The man was standing on the shoulder, the driver’s door open between him and Bertrand, his forearms propped on the car’s roof, evidently admiring the huge white facade and stone columns of the building.

Definitely a weird-looking motherfucker, Bertrand thought.

He went back to his letter. Suddenly the front door of the Baylor home opened, and Thelma and a heavyset man and a blond, sun-browned woman stepped out into their yard, their faces turned up like flowers into the sunlight.

Bertrand was petrified. He had bathed last night in his grandmother’s claw-footed tub, but a vinegary smell rose from his armpits. He wanted to get out of the car, to wave his unfinished letter at them, to make them listen to his offer of restitution. It couldn’t be that hard. Just do it, he told himself.

Then the Baylor family backed out of the driveway, into the road, and drove away as though he were not there.

Bertrand opened his car door and spit on the ground. The wind blew in his face and puffed his shirt, but he knew that once again there would be no respite from his fear and that failure and self-loathing would lay claim to every moment of his day. He wanted to weep.

He got out of his car and wandered down the slope by the bayou, his legs almost caving. The man who had been studying the antebellum home under the oaks roared down the asphalt toward New Iberia, glancing once at Bertrand as he passed.

The man’s face looked exactly like the back of a thumb, a pale white thumb, Bertrand thought. He could not remember ever seeing anyone who looked as strange. Then he sat down in the leaves and put his face in his hands.

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON I drove to Bo Wiggins’s office in the old Lafayette Oil Center. Actually it was more than an office. He had purchased the entire building and had placed a sign that read “James Boyd Wiggins Industri

es” over the front entrance. He was not there and neither was his statuesque secretary with the white-gold hair. The receptionist was talking on the phone. A magazine lay open on her lap and she kept looking down at it while she spoke, shifting her legs so the page wouldn’t flip over and cause her to lose her place. After she hung up, I asked her where I might find Bo and his secretary. She bit on a nail and developed a faraway look in her eyes. “Houston?” she said.

“You’re asking me?” I said.

“No, it’s Miami. They went on his private jet. With some other guys.”

“Which guys?”

“Some contractors.”

“Which contractors?”

“The ones who’re hauling all that storm junk out of New Orleans?”

She had turned a declarative sentence into a question again.