The Tin Roof Blowdown Read Online Free Page A

coffee.”
    “What makes you think you can talk to me like that?”
    “Just speaking to you as a neighbor and a friend.”
    “Don’t.”
    “This isn’t like you, Otis.”
    That’s what you think, you idiot, Otis says to himself, and is surprised by the virulence of his own thoughts.
     
     
     
     

CHAPTER
4
    IT’S SATURDAY EVENING and long lines of automobiles are streaming out of New Orleans, northbound on Interstate 10, although rumors have already spread that there is not a motel room available all the way to St. Louis, Missouri.
    But for the glad of heart, life goes on full-throttle in the French Quarter. In a corner bar off Ursulines, one in which Christmas lights never come down, Clete Purcel has positioned himself at a window so he can watch a shuttered cottage across the street, in front of which a black male is smoking a cigarette in an illegally parked panel truck. The rain has stopped and the air is unnaturally green and contains the dense, heavy odor of the Gulf. There is even a rip of bone-white light in the clouds, as though the evening sunset is about to resume. The black male in the panel truck is talking on a cell phone and blowing his cigarette smoke out the window, where it seems to hang in the air like damp cotton. Then he twists his head and stares at the bar, and for a moment Clete thinks he has been made.
    But the black man is watching a woman in spiked heels and skintight shorts walking rapidly down the sidewalk, her sequined, fringed purse swinging back on her rump. The owner of the bar is opening all the doors, filling the interior with a bloom of fresh air that smells of brine and wet trees. The revelers inside react as though a bad moment in their lives has come and gone.
    “You want another drink? It’s on the house,” the owner says.
    “I look like I can’t pay for my drinks?” Clete says.
    “No, you look like you got the heebie-jeebies. Maybe you ought to get yourself laid.”
    Clete gives the owner a look, one that makes the owner’s eyes shift off Clete’s face. The owner is Jimmy Flannigan, an ex-professional wrestler who now wears earrings and has a full-body wax done at a parlor on Airline Highway.
    “So don’t get laid. But you’re making my customers nervous. No one likes to get stepped on by out-of-control circus elephants.”
    Clete has long ago given up contending with Jimmy’s insults. “I got news for you. The Apocalypse could blow through this dump and your clientele wouldn’t notice,” he says.
    Jimmy pours into Clete’s glass from a Scotch bottle with a chrome nipple on it. The Scotch swirls inside the milk like marbled ice cream. “What’s eatin’ you, Purcel? Just off your feed?” he says.
    Clete drinks his glass half empty. “Something like that,” he says.
    How can he explain to Jimmy Flannigan the sense of apprehension and the déjà vu that dries out his mouth and causes his scalp to tighten against his skull? Or describe helicopters lifting off a rooftop into a sky ribbed with strips of blood-red cloud while Mobs of terrified Vietnamese civilians fight with one another and plead with United States Marines to let them on board? You learn it soon or you learn it late: There are some kinds of experience you never share with anyone, not even with people who have had their ticket punched by the same conductor you have.
    Clete returns to the window and tries to concentrate on the black man parked across the street. The black man is Andre Rochon, a twenty-three-year-old bail skip whose forfeited bond is less consequential than the information he can provide on two other bail skips who are into Clete’s employers, Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine, for thirty large.
    Two drinks later the scene has not changed. And neither has the knot of anxiety in Clete’s stomach or the band of tension that keeps tightening like a strand of piano wire wrapped around his head.
    Clete is convinced he’s watching a meth drop in the making. The two other