The Tin Roof Blowdown Read Online Free PDF Page B

will die if the storm maintains its current category 5 strength and hits New Orleans head-on.
    My adopted daughter, Alafair, just out of Reed College, answers the telephone in the kitchen. I hope the call is from Clete Purcel, agreeing to evacuate from New Orleans and stay at our house. It’s not. The call is from the sheriff of Iberia Parish, Helen Soileau, who has other concerns.
    “We just busted Herman Stanga,” she says. “We got his meth lab and nailed two of his mules.”
    “You know how many times we’ve busted Herman Stanga?”
    “That’s why I want you to supervise the case, Pops. This time we bury him.”
    “Dealing with Herman Stanga is like picking up dog feces with your hands. Get someone else, Helen.”
    “The mules are of more interest to me right now than Stanga. I’ve got both of them in lockup.”
    “What’s interesting about people who have minus signs in front of their IQs?
    “Come on down, check it out.”
     
    THE BARRED CELL has no windows and smells of the disinfectant that has been used to scrub all its steel and concrete surfaces. The two men locked inside have taken off their shirts and their shoes and are doing push-ups with their feet propped on a wood bench. Their arms and plated chests are blue with Gothic-letter tats. Their armpits are shaved, their lats as hard-looking as the sides of coopered barrels, tapering into twenty-eight-inch waists and stomachs that are flat from the sternum to the groin. With each pushup, a network of ten-dons blooms against the tautness of their skin. They have the hands of bricklayers or men who scrub swimming pools clean with muriatic acid or cut and fashion stone in subfreezing weather. The power in their bodies makes you think of a tightly wound steel spring, aching for release, waiting for the slightest of external triggers.
    One of them stops his exercise routine, sits on the bench, and breathes in and out through his nose, indifferent to the fact that Helen and I are only two feet from him, watching him as we would an animal at a zoo.
    “I dig your tats. Are y’all Eighteenth Streeters?” I say.
    He grins and makes no reply. His hair is cut high and tight, his scalp notched with scars.
    “Latin Kings?” I ask.
    “Who?” he says.
    “How about Mara Salvatrucha?” I say.
    He pauses before he replies, his fingers splaying stiffly on his knees, the soles of his shoes clicking playfully on the floor. “Why you think that, man?” he asks.
    “The ‘MS’ tattooed on one eyelid and the ‘13’ on the other were clues,” I say.
    “You nailed me, man,” he says. He looks up into my face, grinning. But the black luster in his eyes is the kind that makes one swallow, not smile in return.
    “I thought you guys were out on the West Coast or creating new opportunities in northern Virginia,” I say.
    His eyes are fixed straight ahead, as though he can see meaning inside the cell’s shadows. Or perhaps he’s staring at images inside his own head, remembering deeds that are testimony to the theory that not all of us descend from the same tree. He bobbles his head back and forth on his shoulders, working out a kink, a prizefighter in the corner awaiting the first-round bell. “When’s chow?” he says.
    “The caterer will be here at six,” Helen says.
    The other man gets off the floor and begins touching his toes, a neat crease folding across his navel, his narrow buttocks turned toward us. I glance at the computer printouts attached to the clipboard in my hand. “Your street name is Chula?” I say to the man sitting on the bench.
    “Yeah, man, you got it.”
    “What’s your name mean?” I ask.
    “‘Put it away,’ man. Like at jai alai? Before the guy slams the ball into the wall, everybody shouts out, ‘Chula! Put it away.’”
    “Y’all got impressive sheets. Lewisburg, Pelican Island, Marion,” I say. “Why fool with a small-town pimp like Herman Stanga?”
    “The black dude? We just stopped and asked for directions. Then