Free The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke

him. He couldn’t remember when she had been so confessional in her need, so dependent upon his strength. “Put the rifle in our bedroom. I know you have it. I saw you with it the other day.”
    “I’ll keep it close by. I promise.”
    She let out her breath and rested her cheek against his shoulder. In ten seconds’ time the embittered woman he had been living with had disappeared and been replaced by the lovely, intelligent woman he had met on a Bahamian beach, under the stars, years ago.
    Otis waited until Melanie and Thelma were setting the dining room table, then removed a pair of binoculars from his desk in the den and focused them on the men who were breaking into homes on the other side of the neutral ground. Tom Claggart tapped on the side window. Otis unlocked the French doors and pulled them open.
    “What is it?” he asked.
    “The Snoop Dogg fan club is looting the goddamn neighborhood is what,” Tom said.
    “What do you want me to do about it?”
    Tom Claggart’s shaved head was pinpointed with sweat in the humidity, his muscle shirt streaked with dirt. “We need to take back our fucking neighborhood. You want in or not?”
    “What I want is for you not to use that kind of language around my home.”
    “Those guys out there file their teeth, Otis. Considering what happened to Thelma, you of all people should know that.”
    “If they try to come in my home, I’ll kill them. So far they haven’t tried to do that. Now go back to your family, Tom.”
    “My family left.” Tom’s face was flat when he said it, his buckshot eyes round and dead, as though he were announcing a fact he himself had not yet assimilated.
    “I’m sorry. I can’t help you,” Otis said.
    Otis closed the French doors and locked them. As he looked at Tom’s expression through the glass, he felt a deep sense of sorrow for him, the same way he had once felt toward his uneducated, work-exhausted father whose sense of self-worth was so low he had to put on a Klansman’s robes to know who he was.
    “Who was that?” Thelma asked.
    “A fellow who will never own anything of value,” Otis said.
    “What’s that mean?” Thelma asked.
    “It means let’s eat,” Otis said, patting her fondly on the back.
    But a few minutes later Otis Baylor realized he had arrived at one of those intersections in life when a seemingly inconsequential decision or event changes one’s direction forever. He had forgotten to return the binoculars to the desk drawer and in the fading twilight Thelma had picked them up and begun scanning the street with them.
    She froze and a muted sound rose from her throat, as though she had stepped on a sharp stone.
    “What’s wrong, kiddo?” he asked.
    “Those guys in the boat,” she replied.
    “They’ll take what they want and they’ll go away. They won’t come here.”
    “No, it’s them, Daddy.”
    He took the binoculars from her and fixed them on the four black males who had now worked their way farther down the street, still on the opposite side of the neutral ground. “Those are the men who attacked you?” he said.
    “The one in the front of the boat is for sure. He kept lighting cigarettes and laughing while they did it to me,” she said. “The guy behind him, the one with the hammer in his hand, he looks just like the guy who—”
    “What?”
    Her face was beginning to crumple now. “Who made me put it in my mouth,” she said.
    Otis cleared his throat slightly, as though a tiny piece of bone were caught in it. He could feel his chest laboring for his next breath, his palms opening and closing at his sides, his mouth drier than he could remember. “You’re absolutely certain?”
    “You don’t believe me? You think I would just pick out some black guys I never saw before and lie about them? Is that what you think of me?”
    The pathos in her face was such he could hardly look at it.
    He walked out on his front porch and stared down the street at the four men. Their boat was a big