The Tin Roof Blowdown Read Online Free PDF

at the end of the block. As Clete tries to shove the door off his chest, Andre Rochon fires up his panel truck and roars away in the opposite direction, his red taillights braking once at the intersection before disappearing into the darkness.
    Jimmy Flannigan and Clete’s other friends from the bar pick him up and clean the glass off his clothes and touch him all over like he’s a piece of bruised fruit, amazed that their friend is still alive. Someone even calls 911 and discovers that every cop and emergency vehicle in Orleans Parish is already overloaded with obligations far beyond their capacity. Clete stands dazed and chagrined in the middle of the street, unable to accept the fact he just got taken down by three dirtbags who couldn’t clean bubble gum off their shoes without a diagram.
    He tells his friends to go back inside the bar, then opens the door to the cottage. Inside, a boy not more than seventeen is sitting on the floor, watching a cartoon on a television set, a paper bag packed with clothes resting by his foot. The volume on the television is deafening. “Turn that off,” Clete says.
    The boy does as he is told. He wears the stylized baggy pants and oversized T-shirt of a gangbanger, but his clothes look fresh from the box and his body is so thin it could be made of sticks.
    “Where are your folks?” Clete asks.
    “My auntie already lined up at the ’Dome to get us cots. My Uncle Andre is taking me there in a li’l bit,” the boy replies. “Everybody suppose to bring food for five days. That’s what they say.”
    “Andre Rochon is your uncle?”
    “Yes, suh.”
    “What’s your name?”
    “Kevin Rochon.”
    “Your uncle had to take off somewhere. If you’re going to the Superdome, you’ll have to walk.”
    “It ain’t no big deal,” the boy says, and refocuses his attention on the cartoon.
    Right, Clete says to himself.
    He goes back to the bar and dispenses with Scotch and milk and orders a frosted mug of beer and three shot glasses brimming with Beam. Within an hour, he’s as drunk as everyone else in the building, safe inside the sweaty ambiance of jukebox music and manufactured good cheer. His face is oily and hot, his head ringing with nonexistent sounds that are generated by armored vehicles and helicopter blades. Two stranded UCLA co-eds are dancing on the bar, one of them toking on a joint she holds to her lips with roach clips. Jimmy Flannigan fits his hand around the pitted back of Clete’s neck and squeezes, as though grasping a fire hydrant. “I just come back from the Superdome. You ought to see the lines. Everybody from the Iberville Project is trying to pack in there,” he says.
    “Yeah?” Clete replies, unsure of the point.
    “Why they sending everybody from the projects to the ’Dome?” Jimmy asks.
    “It has stadium seating,” Clete says.
    “So why do people from the projects got to have stadium seating?”
    “When Lake Pontchartrain covers the city, maybe some of the poor bastards can find an air pocket under the roof and not drown,” he says.

CHAPTER
5
    ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON in New Iberia, the clouds are gray, the leaves of the live oaks along Main Street riffling with an occasional gust of wind. The end of summer has arrived with a smell of dust and distant rain and smoke from meatfires across the bayou in City Park but with no hint that south of us a churning white vortex of wind and water so great in magnitude that only a satellite photograph can do it justice is grinding its way toward the Louisiana-Mississippi coast.
    As I watch the progress of the storm on the television set I feel like a witness to a holocaust in the making. For two days, the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, has been pleading for help to anyone who will listen. A state emergency official in Metairie has become emotionally undone during an CNN interview, waving his arms, his face blotched like a man coming off a drunk. He states unequivocally that sixty-two thousand people