“It’s true, you been teaching the claimants how to slide one by us?” the friend said.
“‘Slide’ is the wrong word. Think more in terms of ‘wrecking ball,’” Otis said, this time hanging up.
It was 3:46 p.m. Outside, the sky was gray, the wind blowing, wet leaves plastering against the windows of his home office. Otis took his car keys from his pants pocket and spun them on his finger.
“Where you going, Daddy?” Thelma asked.
She stood in the doorway, one hip against the jamb, her expression inquisitive and innocent, the way it used to be before she and her date had gotten lost in a neighborhood that in minutes swallowed her alive.
“My father and my uncle were members of the Ku Klux Klan,” he said. “They joined a hateful organization because they had been taught by others to resent themselves. My father was a good man, but he never understood who his real
enemy was. It wasn’t people of color. It was the dragon that lived inside him. You think maybe it’s time you and I go look at the dragons?”
THE RAIN HAD STOPPED and the night sky had cleared when Otis Baylor and his daughter entered the Ninth Ward of Orleans Parish. The topography, the windowless houses, the layers of building debris and garbage and dried flotsam did not look real but instead resembled a movie set or perhaps scenes spliced together from World War II black-and-white footage of a bombed-out city, leached of color, the only light provided by cook fires wavering under sheets of corrugated tin the remaining residents had propped across cinder blocks or stacks of bricks.
Thelma had been silent for the last hour, and Otis wondered if he had asked too much of her, if indeed he had not made a choice for her that wasn’t his to make. He steered around a section of the street that had caved into a canal.
“Daddy?” Thelma said.
“Yes?” he said.
“If he’s there, what are you going to do?”
“I’m not sure. I’m not even sure I trust myself about that.”
“Will you hurt him?”
“I can’t say. But I might. I think I might like to do that. Until Mr. Robicheaux came to our house, I thought 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?”