Chapter 9

EDDY AND BERTRAND Melancon were not given to complexities. They kept it simple. If a good situation put itself in your road, you made use of it. If it might jam you up, you put it in the ditch. Anything wrong with that?

Eddy and Bertrand saw the storm as a gift from God. White people in New Orleans had been making money on the black man’s back for three hundred years. It was time for some payback. The uptown area of the city, from Lee Circle all the way up St. Charles Avenue to the Carrollton District, was like a tree full of ripe peaches waiting to be shook. The Melancon brothers had never been house creeps. They specialized in armed robbery and took down only high-value victims and thought breaking and entering was for chumps who deserved what they got when they walked into a blast from a twelve-gauge shotgun. But when tens of thousands of homes and stores were abandoned and without power, their security systems worthless, the cops either gone or pulling scores themselves, what was a guy supposed to do? Crowd into the stink at the Superdome or the Convention Center and try to find a place on the floor where somebody hadn’t already downloaded his bowels?

The boat they had boosted in the Ninth Ward was perfect for the job. It had a wide beam, a shallow draft, cushioned seats, and a seventy-five-horse motor on it. As long as they concentrated on jewelry, coin collections, guns, and silverware, and avoided loading with heavy stuff like television sets and computers, they could possibly amass major five-figure money by dawn. They just had to keep it simple. The only dude between themselves and Central Lockup was that cracker Purcel, a bucket of whale sperm who did scut work for Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater, and they’d run over his fat ass with their ’sheen in the Quarter, left that motherfucker not knowing what hit him.

Now they were going house-to-house on a flooded street where every live oak was broken in half on top of the yards, only one house with lights working in it, choppers flying overhead to the hospital roof, not a police boat in sight, Bertrand and Eddy both working the upstairs of a mansion that had beds in it with canopies over them, like the kind in Gone with the Wind, Eddy stuffing a woman’s fur coat into a drawstring laundry bag along with a handful of necklaces he found buried at the bottom of her panty drawer.

Bertrand shined the light into the top of the closet. “Look what we got here, man,” he said.

Eddy paused in his work and stared upward at the panel his brother was prying loose from the closet wall. Both brothers were thick-bodied men, the muscles in their shoulders swollen and hard as iron from shrug-lifting sixty-pound dumbbells in each hand. Both were stripped to the waist and sweating profusely in the superheated interior of the house, Bertrand with a red bandana knotted tightly around his head.

Bertrand reached inside the wall and lifted out a short-barreled blue-black revolver with checkered walnut grips and a Ziploc bag fat with white granular crystals. “Oh mama, Whitey’s private stash and a thirty-eight snub. This is gonna be one pissed-off dude,” he said. “Wait a minute. That ain’t all.”

Bertrand stuck the bag of cocaine down the front of his trousers and handed the revolver to his brother. He reached back inside the wall and lifted out five bundles of one-hundred-dollar bills, each of them wrapped with a wide rubber band. He whistled. “Do you believe this shit? This motherfucker’s in the life.”

“Maybe this ain’t the place to take down,” Eddy said.

“Hey, man, ain’t nobody know we here. This is our night. We ain’t blowing it.”

“You’re right, man. The dagos ain’t running things no more, nohow. What you doing?”

Bertrand stuck the bundled bills in the bag, his eyes dancing in the glow of the flashlight. “Don’t worry about it.”

A third man entered the room. He had pulled off a gold-and-purple T-shirt and wadded it up and was using it to mop the sweat off his chest and out of his armpits. He wore paint-splattered slacks and tennis shoes without socks. Whiskers grew on his chin like strands of black wire. “Kevin thinks he saw a guy out in the street,” he said.

“That kid’s been wetting his pants all night. I told you not to bring him,” Bertrand said.

“He’s just saying what he saw, man,” the third man said. His eyes dropped to Bertrand’s waistline and the Ziploc bag that protruded from his trousers. “Where’d you get the blow?”

“Same place we got the thirty-eight. Now go take care of Kevin. We gonna be right there. I don’t want to be hearing about nobody out in the street, either. It’s Michael Jackson and Thriller out there. This city is a graveyard and we own the shovels and the headstones. Motherfucker come in here, he gonna eat one of these thirty-eights. You hear me, Andre? Get your ass downstairs and bring up the boat. And don’t be cranking it till we there.”

“What y’all got in the laundry bag?” the third man said.

“Andre, what it take for you to understand?” Bertrand said.

“I’m just axing,” the third man replied. “We in this together, ain’t we?”

“That’s right. So go do what he say,” Eddy said.

Andre huffed air out his nostrils and disappeared down the stairway. Bertrand tapped one fist on top of the other, his gaze roving around the room. “There’s more. I can feel it. I can smell money in the walls,” he said.

“What you smell is them flowers all over the place. What kind of people put flower vases in every room in the house right before a hurricane?” Eddy said.

The question was a legitimate one. Who could afford to place fresh bowls of roses and orchids and carnations in a dozen rooms every three or four days? Who would want to? Bertrand stared at the water stains in the wallpaper and pushed against the softness of the lathwork underneath, his stomach on fire, rivulets of sweat running out of his bandana. “These walls is busting wit’ it, Eddy. It’s a drop or something,” he said.

“Give it up, man,” Eddy said. “It’s burning up in here. It must be a hundred and twenty degrees.”

Bertrand looked hard at his brother and grimaced as his ulcers flared again. This could be the perfect score. Why did his insides have to betray him now, why was his head always full of broken glass? Why wasn’t anything easy?

“All right,” he said, drawing a quiet breath.

“That’s better,” Eddy said. “You’re always grieving, man, firing yourself up over things you cain’t change. We ain’t made the world. Time to enjoy life, not worry so much all the time.”

Both of them went downstairs, the flashlight’s beam bouncing in front of them. Then Bertrand clicked off the light and the two of them climbed into the boat with Andre and his nephew. The sky was orange from a fire on the next block and inside the smoke and mist and humidity the air smelled like garbage burning on a cold day at the City dump.

Bertrand looked back over his shoulder at the house. For some reason that he couldn’t understand, he felt his entry into this deserted, antebellum structure had just changed his life in a fashion that was irreversible. But for good or bad? Why were knives always whirling inside him?

Suddenly, like a camera shutter opening in his mind, he saw a young girl fighting against the polyethylene rope that bound her arms and ankles, thrashing her feet against the floor of a panel truck, her stuffed bear lying beside her. He shook the image out of his head and pointed his face into the wind as their aluminum boat sped down the flooded alleyway, trash cans bobbing in the engine’s wake, helicopters flying overhead to airlift the most desperate of the desperate from the hospital in which Bertrand Melancon had been born.

It was close to midnight before Otis dressed for bed. He removed the cartridge from the chamber of the Springfield, pressed it back down in the magazine, and locked down the bolt. He propped the rifle by a dormer window that gave an encompassing view of the front yard, checked all the doors again, and kissed Thelma good night. Then he made an old-fashioned for both himself and Melanie and took them up to the bedroom on a silver tray with three pieces of chocolate on it.

“What’s all this for?” she asked.

“We owe ourselves a treat. Tomorrow will be a fine day. I genuinely believe it will.”

She wore a pink nightgown and had been reading on top of the sheets. The gasoline-powered generators could not adequately support the air-conditioning system, but the attic fan was on and her bare shoulders looked cool and lovely in the breeze through the window. She placed her book on the floor and bit into a square of French chocolate, pushing little pieces of it back into her mouth with her fingertips. She smiled at him. “Turn out the light,” she said.

Later, when Otis fell asleep, his thoughts were peaceful, his body drained of all the rage and turmoil that had beset his life since his daughter was attacked. His home had survived Katrina. His wife was his wife again. And he had gone after his daughter’s attackers with both firmness of purpose and a measure of mercy. More important, he had made his house a safe harbor in a time of societal collapse, the front yard and driveway pooled with an apron of light that held back the darkness and the men who prowled it. A man could have done worse.


INSIDE THE BACK of the looted Rite Aid drugstore, Bertrand Melancon felt like fire ants were eating the lining of his stomach. Andre and his nephew still didn’t know about the bundled cash in the laundry bag, but it was only a matter of time before they either saw it or figured out why Eddy was acting hinky. Maybe it was better to split the loot fair and square and be done with it, he thought. The Rite Aid had been ripped apart and was in complete darkness, but it was a good place to cool out, do a few lines of the high-grade flake from the house full of flowers, and work things out. Yeah, that was it. Don’t stiff nobody and you don’t got to be watching your back all the time. But dividing up cold cash that he found, that he ripped out of the wall, wasn’t going to be easy. On several levels, personal and otherwise.

“Look, me and Eddy got a surprise for you. That last house had some money in a wall. We’re gonna give y’all your cut now, in case something go sout’ and some of us get picked up,” Bertrand said.

There was no sound in the room. Andre was seated on a metal desk, drinking from a warm can of Coca-Cola he’d found under a destroyed display rack out front. He had thrown away his soiled LSU T-shirt and in the flashes of heat lightning through the window his skin was the color of dusty leather, his nipples like brown dimes. “How come we just hearing about that now?” he asked.

Bertrand slapped a mosquito on his neck and studied it. “’Cause I didn’t want no complications back there,” he said. “’Cause I don’t be explaining everything as we go. ’Cause you getting cut in on what you ain’t found, Andre, wit’ an equal share for your young relative here, even though you and him ain’t had nothing to do wit’ finding the money. If I was you, I’d show some humbleness and be thankful for what I got.”

“The split’s always been fair, ain’t it?” Eddy said.

“If it ain’t been fair, I wouldn’t have no way of knowing, would I?” Andre said.

But Bertrand no longer cared if Andre believed him and Eddy or not. That house back there on the flooded alley was creaking with cash-ola. Ten more minutes with the ball-peen and the crowbar and he would have had the upstairs walls peeled down to the floor. Bertrand could see stacks of cash tumbling out on his shoe tops.

He looked at his watch. It was one in the morning. He and Eddy could be at the alley in less than a half hour, cut the engine, and hand-pull the boat in from the side street. Nobody would even know they were there. Because they already knew the layout they could probably work inside without flashlights. This was the big score, man. He’d done right by Andre and his nephew and it was time to get back into action. Screw this diplomacy shit.

“Me and Eddy are going back. Y’all stay here,” Bertrand said.

Andre pinched his abs, his eyes empty, his mouth pursed. “How come we get left behind?”

“Let me ax you a better question,” Bertrand said. “How come you always feeling yourself up?”

“Why don’t you lay off me, man? Case you ain’t noticed, the buses and the streetcar ain’t running,” Andre said. “We suppose to carry our loot t’rou town?”

“Andre’s right, man. One for all and all for one. We all going back together,” Eddy said. He lit a cigarette and blew out smoke without removing the cigarette from his lips. He looked at Andre’s nephew. “You up for that, my li’l brother?”

Kevin was seated on the floor, eating a fried pie, his springy hair bright with sweat. He wiped his mouth with his shirt. “I ain’t scared,” he said.

Bertrand wanted to shove Eddy’s head into a commode.


OTIS SLEPT THE sleep of the dead, his wife’s hip nestled against him, the attic fan drawing a breeze across their bodies. He dreamed of his parents and the tiny yellow house he had grown up in. In the spring the grass was always cool in the evening and full of clover, and when his father came home from work at the sawmill, they played a game of pitch-and-catch in the front yard. There were cows and horses in a field behind the house, and a big hackberry tree in the side yard that shaded the roof during the hottest hours of the day. Otis had always loved the house he had grown up in and he had loved his family and had always believed he was loved by them in return.

He believed this right up to the Indian-summer afternoon his father discovered his wife’s infidelity and shot her lover to death on the steps of the Baptist church where he served as pastor, then came home and was shot down and killed by a volunteer constable who had once been his fishing partner.

Otis sat straight up in bed. Then he went into the bathroom and tried to wash his face in the lavatory. The faucet made a loud, squeaking sound, and a pipe vibrated dryly in the wall.

“What was that?” Melanie said from the bed.

“It’s just me. I forgot the water was off.”

“I thought I heard something outside.”

He walked back into the bedroom, his bare feet padding on the carpet. All he could hear was the steady drone of the attic fan and the wind in the trees on the north side of the house. He looked out on the street. The moon had broken out of the clouds and created a black glaze on the surface of the floodwater. A solitary palm frond rustled against the side of a tree trunk on the neutral ground and a trash can turned in an eddy by a plugged storm drain.

“I had a bad dream. I was probably talking in my sleep,” he said.

“Are you sure no one is out there?”

“I never told you how my father died.”

She raised herself on her elbow, her face lined from the pillow. “I thought he had leukemia.”

“He did. But that’s not how he died. He was shot to death by a friend of his, a constable. He was going to kill my mother,” Otis said. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring into space, his back to his wife, when he said this.

The room was silent a long time. When he lay back down, Melanie took his hand in hers. “Otis?” she said, looking up into the darkness.

“Yes?”

“We mustn’t ever tell anyone about this. That is not what happened in your family.”

In the glow of moonlight through the window, her face looked as though it had been sculpted in alabaster.

“Say that again?” Otis asked.

“You’re a respected insurance executive in New Orleans. That’s what you will remain. That story you just told me has no application in our lives today.”

“Mel?” he began.

“Please. I’ve told you not to call me that, Otis. It’s not a lot to ask.”

Otis went downstairs to the den and lay down on a black leather couch, a cushion over his head, his ears ringing with a sound like wind in seashells.

BERTRAND COULDN’T give up his resentment toward Eddy all the way back to the house where he’d found the cash and dope and the.38 snub. Eddy loved playing the big shot, handing out favors to people, screwing a cigarette in his mouth, firing it up with a Zippo, snapping the lid back tight, like he was the dude in control. Except Eddy was being generous with what wasn’t his to be generous with, in this case the biggest score of their lives. Andre was sitting backward on the bow of the boat, like he was lookout man, scanning the horizon, some kind of commando about to take down osama bin Laden.

What a pair of jokers. Maybe it was time to cut both of them loose.

But the real reason for Bertrand’s resentment of Eddy and Andre had little to do with the score at the house and he knew it. Every time he looked into their faces he saw his own face, and what he saw there set his stomach on fire again.

Maybe he could get away from Andre and Eddy and start over somewhere else. Forget about what they had done when they were stoned. Yeah, maybe he could even make up for it, write those girls a note and mail it to the newspaper from another city. It hadn’t been his idea anyway. It was Eddy who always had a thing about young white girls, always saying sick stuff when they pulled up to them next to a red light. Andre had been a sex freak ever since he got turned out in the Lafourche Parish Prison. Bertrand never got off hurting people.

But no matter how many times Bertrand went over the assault on the two victims, he could not escape one conclusion about his participation: He had entered into it willingly, and when he saw revulsion in the face of the girl they had taken out of the car with the dead battery, he had done it to her with greater violence than either his brother or Andre.

In these moments he hated himself and sometimes even wished someone would drive a bullet through his brain and stop the thoughts that kept his stomach on fire.

The street was completely dark, except for one house where the owner obviously had his own generators working. Eddy cut the engine at the end of the block and let the boat drift through mounds of partially submerged oak limbs into the side yard of the house they had creeped three hours earlier.

In minutes the four of them were ripping the Sheetrock and lathwork and plaster off the studs in every room in the house. In fact, it was fun tearing the place apart. The air and carpets were white with dust, the flower vases smashed and the flowers scattered, the kitchen a shambles, electric wiring hanging like spaghetti out of the walls.

“This motherfucker gonna brown his drawers when he come home,” Eddy said. “Hey, man, dig Andre in the kitchen.”

Bertrand couldn’t believe it. Andre had unbuttoned his trousers and was looping a high arc of urine into the sink.

“That’s sick, man,” Bertrand said.

“You’re right,” Andre answered. He spun around and hosed down the stove and an opened drawer that was full of seasoning, saving out enough for the icebox.

That was it, Bertrand said to himself. He was splitting.

Then Eddy splintered a chunk of plywood out of the pantry ceiling with his crowbar, and a cascade of bundled fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills poured down on his head. “Oh man, you was right from the jump, Bertrand, this is a motherfucking bank.”

The four of them began scooping up the money, throwing it into a vinyl garbage bag, Bertrand estimating the count as each pack of bills thudded into the bottom of the bag. He ran out of math in the sixty-thousand range.

“We rich,” Andre said. “We rich, man. We rich. Ain’t nobody gonna believe this.”

“That’s right, ’Cause you ain’t gonna tell them,” Bertrand said.

“Hey, man, Andre’s cool. Don’t be talking to a brother like that,” Eddy said.

“Eddy, I want you to clean the wax out of your ears and hear this real good. That’s the last time you’re gonna act like you big shit at my expense,” Bertrand said.

“Hey, like Andre say, we all rich. We ain’t got time to be fighting among ourselves,” Kevin said. “We gonna burn the house? I mean, to get rid of the fingerprints and all?”

The three older men stared at him with their mouths open.


UP THE STREET, on the other side of the neutral ground, Tom Claggart and two friends had nodded off on pallets they had laid out on Claggart’s living room floor, hoping to catch the faint breeze that puffed through the doorway and to avoid as much as possible the layers of heat that had mushroomed against the ceilings. Their pistols and shotguns and hunting rifles were oiled and loaded and propped against the divan or hung on the backs of chairs. Their boxes of brass cartridges and shotgun shells were placed neatly on the mantel above the fireplace. All their empty beer cans and bread wrappers and empty containers of corn beef and boneless turkey and mustard and horseradish and dirty paper plates and plastic forks and spoons were wrapped and sealed in odor-proof bags. When one of them had to relieve himself, he did so in the backyard and took an entrenching tool with him.

No hunting camp could have been neater or better regulated. There was only one problem. Tom Claggart and his friends had not been presented with an opportunity to discharge a round all night, even though they and several others had made probes by boat and on foot into two adjoining neighborhoods where sparks from burning houses drifted through the live oaks like fireflies.

It seemed hardly fair.


“DON’T GO BACK by that lighted house, man. Go back the way we come,” Bertrand said from the bow of the boat.

“No, man, we’re hauling ass. We ain’t bothered them people. They ain’t gonna bother us,” Eddy said, sitting sideways in the stern, opening up the throttle.

“You just don’t listen, man,” Bertrand said, his words lost in the roar of the engine.

The boat swerved through clumps of broken tree limbs in the street and raked on the curbing along the neutral ground. Andre was laughing, sticking his hand down in the vinyl bag to feel the tightly packed bundles of cash there, his nephew eating one of the candy bars he’d found in the Rite Aid. The wind had cleared the smoke off the street, and the water was black, stained with a rainbow slick, a busted main pumping a geyser in the air like a fountain in the park. If Bertrand got out of this with his share of the score intact, he was leaving New Orleans forever, starting over in a new place, maybe out on the West Coast, where people lived in regular neighborhoods, with parks and beaches and nice supermarkets close by. Yeah, a place where it was always seventy-five degrees and he could open a restaurant or a car wash with the money from the score and tool down palm-lined avenues in a brand-new convertible, Three 6 Mafia blaring from the speakers.

Yeah, that was the way it was going to be.

The motor coughed once, sputtered, and died. The boat rose on its wake and glided into a fallen oak limb, the branches scratching loudly against the aluminum sides. Bertrand could feel his skin shrink on his face, his ears popping in the silence. “I don’t believe it,” he said.

“It’s out of gas. It ain’t my fault,” Eddy said.

“You never looked at the gauge?” Bertrand said.

“You didn’t look at it, either, man. Get off my case,” Eddy said.

“Maybe the line just got something in it,” Andre said.

“It’s empty, man,” Eddy said.

Andre stood up clumsily, rocking the boat. He tugged at the gas can and slammed it back down. “What we gonna do?”

“You gonna shut up. You gonna stop making all that noise,” Bertrand said.

“I’m just trying to help, man. We can tow it,” Andre said.

“There’s water out there that’s six feet deep,” Bertrand said.

Andre started to speak again.

“Just let me think,” Bertrand said.

The four of them sat silently in the darkness, the branches of the downed oak limb sticking them in the eyes and the backs of their necks each time the wind blew against the boat.

Bertrand stepped over the side into the water. “Y’all wait here. Don’t do nothing. Don’t talk. Don’t make no noise. Don’t be playing wit’ the money in the bag. Keep your ass in the boat and your mout’ shut. Y’all got that?”

“What you gonna do?” Eddy said.

“Hear that sound? The man over there got generators in his garage. That means he got gas cans in his garage.”

“Why you walking bent over, wit’ your hand on your stomach?” Andre asked.

“’Cause y’all give me ulcers,” Bertrand replied.

“I ain’t meant nothing by it. You a smart man,” Andre said.

No, just not as dumb as y’all, Bertrand thought to himself.

He waded across the neutral ground and approached the driveway of the lighted house. A bulb burned on the front gallery and another inside the porte cochere. A light in the kitchen fell through the windows on part of the driveway and the backyard. His heart was hammering against his rib cage, his pulse jumping in his neck. He tripped on a curbstone and almost fell headlong into the water. In the darkness he thought he saw eyes looking at him from the tangles of brush and tree limbs in the yard. He wondered if he was losing his mind. He stopped and stared into the yard, then realized wood rabbits had sought refuge from the floodwater and had climbed into the downed limbs and were perched there like birds, their fur sparkling with moisture.

Bertrand worked his way around the far side of the porte cochere, avoiding the light. He crossed between two huge camellia bushes, the leaves brushing back wetly against his arms, and entered the parking area by what uptown white people called “the carriage house.” Why did they call it a carriage house when they didn’t own no carriages? He asked himself. ’Cause that’s a way of telling everybody Robert E. Lee took a dump in their commode in 1865?

He could hear at least two generators puttering beyond the half-opened door of the “carriage house.” Then he detoured through the backyard and crossed into the neighbor’s property, looked around, and removed an object from under his shirt. He bent over briefly, then retraced his steps back into Otis Baylor’s yard, his ulcers digging their roots deeper into his stomach lining. He stepped inside the carriage house and let his eyes adjust to the darkness. Five jerry cans of gasoline were lined against the wall. He hefted up one in each hand and headed for the street, the St. Augustine grass by the porte cochere squishing under his shoes, the weight of the gas swinging in the cans. He had pulled it off. Right on, Bertrand. Stomp ass and take names, my brother, a voice said inside him.

Then he was past the apron of electrical light that shone into the yard, back into the safety of the street and the warmth of the floodwater that covered his ankles and rose up the calves of his legs like an old friend. Soon he would split from Eddy and the Rochons and be home free and free at last, loaded with money for good doctors and the good life. It would be Adios, all you stupid motherfuckers, Bertrand Melancon is California-bound.

Then he saw Eddy towing the boat from behind the pile of downed limbs, giving up their natural cover, an unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth. Andre and Kevin were outside the boat, too, steering it around obstacles in the water, all them now in full view of the house from which Bertrand had just stolen the jerry cans of gasoline.

“What the fuck you doing, man? Why didn’t y’all stay put?” Bertrand said.

“What took you so long? You stop to flog your rod back there? Fill her up and let’s go,” Eddy said.

He sparked his Zippo, the tiny emery wheel rolling on the flint-once, twice, three times.

“Eddy-” Bertrand heard himself say.

The Zippo’s flame flared in the darkness, crisping the end of Eddy’s cigarette, lighting an inquisitive smile on his face, as though he had not understood what his brother had said.

Bertrand heard a single report behind him, but he could not coordinate the sound with the event taking place in front of him. A red flower burst from Eddy’s throat and a split second later, right behind Eddy, the cap of Kevin Rochon’s skull exploded from his head, scattering his brains on the water like freshly cooked oatmeal.

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