The Tin Roof Blowdown (Dave Robicheaux 16)

I don’t think I have ever seen a man look as dumbfounded as Otis Baylor did in that moment. He stared at me for a long time. “Mr. Robicheaux, please don’t be vague or misleading.”

“What I’ve said to you is an accurate statement. For what it’s worth, I think Melancon is sorry for what he did. I think he also knows it’s a matter of time before he catches the bus. If he’s lucky, somebody won’t use a blowtorch on him first. That’s not an exaggeration. Andre Rochon probably suffered the pains of the damned before he died.”

“My God in heaven,” he said in dismay, his face white.

“What have you done, sir?”

He shook his head, his eyes filming.

“Talk to me, Mr. Baylor. This is the time to do it.”

“I haven’t done anything,” he said. “Please excuse me. We have to finish dinner. I have to help my wife with the dishes. I have to help my daughter with some of her schoolwork. Please excuse me, sir.”

He went inside the house and I heard him snap the door bolt in place. But I didn’t leave the yard. I stood a long time in the shadows, inside the sounds of birds gathering in the treetops and some kids in a pirogue out on the bayou. The wind rattled the shutters on his windows and sent leaves feathering off the eaves. The blinds were drawn, the window frames etched by yellow light from inside. Under other circumstances, the house might have been a picture of familial warmth against the coming of the night. But not a sound came from the house and my guess was that nothing aside from misery lived inside those walls.

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SUNDAY MORNING I convinced Molly and Alafair to go with me to a camp I had rented on the levee by Henderson Swamp. It was a fine place, built of pine, partially

set on pilings, the screen gallery facing a bay that was dotted with cypress trees and willow islands. The wind was down, the sac-a-lait had been biting, and I wanted to get out of town and away from concerns about Ronald Bledsoe, at least for a day. We hitched up the boat and trailer, packed food and cold drinks in the cooler, and stretched bungee cords across the rods and life preservers in the bottom of the boat. I glanced at the sky in the south and went back into the house for our raincoats. Alafair followed me inside.

“Dave, we don’t have to do this,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Run away from this guy.”

“The perps all go down. Just wait them out and they go down.”

“How long was Hitler killing people? Twelve years?” she said.

When we reached the swamp, the bays were dented with raindrops. The early-morning fishermen who had gone out for crappie, or what are called “sac-a-lait” in south Louisiana, were already coming back in. We drove along the top of the levee, past the boat-rental and bait shops and the restaurants that offer swamp tours in French and English. Then we entered a long stretch of verdant waterside terrain that was unmarked by litter or development or even weekend fish camps of the kind I had rented.

Alafair and I put the boat in the water and used the electric motor to fish along a chain of willow islands between the levee and the bay. We tried shiners and then jigs, both without success. The wind had come up and the water was cloudy and too high, the time of day wrong as well. But I didn’t care. I just wanted to be with Alafair and Molly, away from town, away from the job, away from avarice and deceit and people scamming people and profiting from the desperation and hardship of their fellow Americans.

The change of the season was already in the air. The leaves of the cypress had turned gold and I could smell gas on the breeze. The flooded woods along the shore were dark, the lily pads that had bloomed with yellow flowers in the summer now curling into brown husks along the edges. I could smell schools of fish under the water, like the seminal odor of birth, but I could see nothing below the darkness on the surface, as though part of a life cycle were being removed from my own life.

Up on the levee a skinned pickup truck loaded with a family bounced down the road toward a boat ramp. Then a kid on a motorbike went by, followed by a black Humvee with tinted windows rolled halfway up.

A solitary turkey buzzard turned slowly overhead, as though in anticipation of a death that had not yet occurred. Then it tilted against the sky and glided farther out on the bay, perhaps seeking carrion in another place, or perhaps indicating respite, I didn’t know which. I did not like to dwell on the biblical allocation of threescore and ten. But at a certain age, consciousness of mortality is not an elective study.

“You worry too much about Molly and me,” Alafair said out of nowhere.

“Think so?” I said, our boat drifting unanchored in the wind now.

“What happens, happens. We’re not afraid. Why should you be?”

Because I live inside you, I thought. Because if you die, so do I.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“Nothing. I just talk to myself sometimes. It goes with the seventh-inning stretch.”

“You’re too much,” she said.

Later, a shower passed over the swamp, then the air turned cool and the sky brightened and we went back down the levee for supper at a restaurant that was built over the water. It had been a fine day, even though we had caught no fish, and we began straightening up the camp, washing and putting away the dishes, locking all the windows. Out on the bay, behind a distant line of trees, the sun seemed to be sliding off the watery rim of the world. A determined fisherman in a straw hat had dropped anchor in the willow islands, inside the clouds of mosquitoes that always gathered in the trees just before sunset and usually brought the sac-a-lait up just before dark. He kept wiping mosquitoes out of his face and jigging his pole, like an agitated man trying to impose magic on a fruitless pursuit. Then his line snagged in a tree and he stopped long enough to hose himself down with insect repellent before starting in again.

“Give me the truck keys, Dave, and I’ll bring the trailer around,” Alafair said.