The John Milton Series Boxset 2

by Mark Dawson

  “No. There, please.”

  “What you want, going over there?”

  “There’s a project. New houses being built by a charity. You know about that?”

  “Sure,” the man said. “That’s Salvation Row. Everyone knows about that.”

  #

  THEY DROVE east on I-10, into the city, the increasing affluence reflected in the grandiosity of the buildings. Soon, though, the buildings became older and shabbier, the money scarcer and less obvious. They took the Claiborne Avenue Bridge over the Industrial Canal, and then bounced along fractured asphalt into the poorer districts of the city.

  Into the Lower Ninth.

  Milton looked out onto an alien landscape.

  The homes had been reduced to husks. Some of them were choked with vines, others still bore the spray-painted Xs that meant that a body had been found inside them. There were piles of construction debris that had been dumped on the sidewalks. Milton had read about contractors who just drove down into the Lower Ninth to get rid of their unwanted materials rather than taking them to the city dump. Auto shops, instead of paying the fee to dispose of used tires, brought trailers of them down here and pushed them off the back.

  “What you think?” the driver said, looking at Milton in the mirror.

  Milton was distracted. “What?”

  “About this. What the storm did.”

  “It’s unbelievable.”

  “You telling me, brother. We got snakes here. Long, thick snakes. King snakes. Rattlesnakes. I seen raccoons. Egrets. Pelicans. It’s like the jungle, and I’m not kidding.”

  There were burned piles of household trash, clumps of insulation foam, stained PVC pipes, waterlogged couches that were bloated like sea sponges and covered in lichen.

  “See the cars?” the driver said. “You never know what you gonna find if you go looking in them too closely. I remember there was a Dodge Charger, down on Choctaw and Law. The police found this corpse in it, all burned up and shit. Car been there for months before someone thought to look into it. By the time they did, it was hidden inside all this grass, taller than a man. Animals had eaten that poor sucker up. What else they gonna find in the grass and jungle?”

  They moved on, the driver slowing so that Milton could look out and soak in the whole scene. They passed a handwritten sign: “Tourist. Shame on you. Driving by without stopping. Paying to see my pain. 1600 died here.” An entire stretch of street was no longer visible. It had been devoured by forest. Every housing plot on both sides of the street for two blocks, between Rocheblave and Law, was abandoned.

  The driver gestured out the window with flicks of his fingers. “And we got packs of wild dogs. Some of them, beautiful Rottweilers, they owners either dead or don’t care for them no more. They been roaming around, scaring the shit out of folk. First time I see them, they were nice looking animals, inside-the-house animals. Now they just look sad, they ribs all showing and shit.”

  Vast stretches of the land had been abandoned. Sometimes, it was possible to see the ghostly marks of old foundations, all that was left of the houses that had once stood here. In other places, more often, the vegetation had grown up so much that it was impossible to see where one plot ended and the next began. There was Southern cut grass, giant ragweed, Chinese tallow trees. It was all totally out of control.

  The driver was watching Milton’s reaction in the mirror.

  “What you think?”

  He said nothing.

  The parish no longer resembled an urban environment. Where there had once been rows of single-family homes with driveways and front yards, all in apple-pie order, now there was jungle. The vegetation had all sprouted since Katrina. Trees that did not exist before the storm now stood taller than the broken-backed street lamps. The asphalt was buckled and twisted with spreading roots. The inhabited lots, about one per block, looked out of place. Their owners kept their lawns mowed, the fences painted, the houses well maintained. But they were fighting back the wilderness on all sides.

  “What you doing down here, then? You just come to look around?”

  “No.”

  “Reason I ask, we got people coming here now just to look. You saw that sign, right? Tourists, can you believe that? They got buses and shit running around here like it’s some sort of freak show.”

  “I’m here to help.”

  “You got a billion dollars?”

  “I read about the Build It Up Foundation. The new houses.”

  “Yeah,” the man said. “They’ll do a good job, if the city let’s ’em.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Lot of bureaucracy. Lot of people trying to line they pockets, take advantage of others’ misery. You see. Same old N’Awlins, buddy. Same old, same old.”

  It wasn’t difficult to find the plot of land that had been purchased by the Build It Up Foundation. It was a wide expanse of several acres, bounded by Reynes Street, North Galvez Street, Caffin Avenue and North Derbigny Street. It was, Milton saw, very close to where the Solomon house had once been. He recognised the junction where Ziggy Penn had been taken out by the Irish, and remembered the configuration of the road, but, beyond that, everything was different. The rows of houses that had formed the roads and avenues had all been demolished. Wide swathes of the vegetation had been cleared and, as they drove through one block, they watched workers as they cut back the worst of the overgrowth.

  And then they turned onto a new road. A sign, bright and clean, read SALVATION ROW. Beyond it, he saw a line of brand new houses. Jaunty and bright, a snaggle of sawtooth angles in various vivid colours.

  “Here you go,” the driver said.

  Milton handed over a twenty, told the man to keep the change, and got out. The humidity slapped down at him, a broiling heat that made him wish that he was wearing something on his head. He reached back inside for his pack and hauled it out.

  The car rolled away as he turned to the nearest of the new houses. It was not just a slapdash replacement. It was well built and substantial, a mustard-yellow, four-bedroom house perched on seven-foot-tall stilts with a roof that slanted up from front to back and leant to the side. It was very impressive.

  A black man came out of the house and made his way down the neatly tended path to the sidewalk.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I hope so. I’m looking for Isadora Bartholomew.”

  “Izzy?” The man laughed. “You in the right place, brother.” He turned and pointed down the street to where several new houses were being built. “She’s over there. Up on the roof.”

  Chapter Nine

  MILTON EXAMINED the new house as he approached it. It was built on concrete pilings and elevated to the same seven feet above the ground. The fibre-cement sidings were reinforced, and the window and door frames were built of hurricane-resistant Kevlar.

  A sign planted in the lawn outside the front door said “JUST $1,500 CASH DOWN.”

  He turned off the sidewalk and walked up to the house.

  He saw Isadora Bartholomew before he was halfway to the front door. She was up on the roof, wearing high-cut, frayed shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt that exposed her slender midriff. She was wearing a tool belt and a yellow safety helmet, her long hair tied up in a tail so that it poked out of the back. She was affixing a solar panel to the shingles, the last unit before that aspect of the roof was covered with them.

  Milton cleared his throat.

  The electric drill that she was using was too loud, so she didn’t hear him.

  “Hello,” he called, careful not to surprise her.

  “One minute,” she said, not turning.

  Milton waited, taking a step back so that he could see her more clearly. She took a screw from a pouch on her belt, lined it up with the corner of the unit, and drilled it into the roof. She reached down and tugged it until she was satisfied that it was properly secured, rested the drill against the top edge of the panel and turned around.

  She swiped the sweat from her eyes. �
�Can I help you?”

  “Isadora,” Milton said.

  “That’s my name. How can I help you?”

  “It’s John Smith.”

  She peered down at him. “Sorry. I—”

  “We met the night of the hurricane. Your brother helped my friend. We were in your parents’ house when it—”

  “Shit,” she said, her eyes going wide. “Mr. Smith? What are you doing here?”

  “I was in town,” he said, smiling the lie away. “I read about what you were doing. Thought I’d come and take a look.”

  “Mr. Smith,” she said for a second time. “Shit.”

  He felt bad that she only had the false name that he had given her. It was too late to correct that now, not without prompting questions that he wouldn’t be able to answer. That would lead to suspicion, and he wouldn’t be able to help her if she doubted him. That was just one of the gifts with which his profession had furnished him: he had to live with a lot of lies.

  “It’s John,” he said. “Please, you have to call me John.”

  #

  IZZY CLAMBERED down a ladder and took him back to a portable office behind the show home and showed him inside. It was being used as the base for the project. There were charts on the wall, photographs and sketches, schedules and plans. There was a single desk in the middle of the cabin. A man in a high-vis jacket was on the opposite side of the desk, smoking a cigarette while he argued with someone on the telephone. He saw Isadora, clocked Milton and—perhaps mistaking him for someone important—collected his helmet from atop the pile of papers on the desk and went outside. Izzy went around and sat in the newly vacated chair, indicating that Milton should take the other one. He did.

  “What are you doing here?” she said again.

  “Like I said. I heard about all this”—he spread his arms—“saw you were involved, and thought I’d come and have a look.”

  She looked squarely at him. “What do you think?” There was the edge of a smile on her lips, but it was obvious that the answer meant a lot to her. Not that it was his answer that she wanted, not especially. Milton guessed that she invested a lot in the answer every time she asked the question.

  “I think it’s amazing. The houses. They’re very impressive.”

  “We’re building the houses first, and then, eventually, a community centre.”

  “How many?”

  “Ten, so far, but we’ve got plans for fifty. That depends on a few things going right for us, though.”

  “Money?”

  “We’ve got the money. It’s self-sustaining. It’s…well, bits of it are more complicated than others.”

  Milton could see there was more to that than she had explained, and he remembered what she had said on the television, but he decided that this wasn’t the right time to focus on a negative. There were too many positives to acknowledge first. “Who set the charity up?”

  “I did. Five years ago. It was small then. Just me, really.”

  “But?”

  “But I raised some money, and…well, we started to grow.” She smiled at him warmly, her bright teeth showing. “Look, I could talk to you about it, or I could give you the tour. You got half an hour?”

  “I’ve got all day.”

  “Come on, then.”

  She got up and, as she did, she bumped up against the desk. A framed photograph that had been standing there toppled over. Milton caught it before it could fall to the floor and put it back.

  He looked at it. The photograph was of a family: two young parents, two kids. They were standing on the porch of one of the new houses, the siding painted a bright and optimistic yellow. “Happy customers?”

  “Happy homeowners,” she corrected. “The second family we moved in here. We’ve got a homeownership counsellor on the books, she managed to get them $75,000 in down payment and closing assistance. They paid just north of $90,000 for a home that would have cost twice that before the storm, one that’ll last them for as long as they need it for their kids to grow up. They lost their home in the flood. Lost everything. They’d been in a shelter for four years. Seeing the kids smile like they did when they moved in… man, I could retire right now and be happy.”

  “They were the second family? Who was the first?”

  “Come on,” she said. “We’ll go see them.”

  They went outside, back into the smack of the heat.

  “You want the standard tour or the extended one?”

  “Whichever you think I need.”

  “All right.” She touched his shoulder, and they set off down Salvation Row away from the new houses. They walked for five minutes until they turned a corner and started down a street that had not been cleared. It had the same row of tumbledown shacks as Milton had seen during his taxi ride, the same overgrown vegetation.

  “You come in from the city?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you saw what the parish is like? Like this?”

  “Like a nuclear bomb went off.”

  She nodded somberly. “Pretty brutal. The houses were all wrecked. Most of them were demolished. The ones that were still structurally sound were flooded out. Eighty-five percent of the families who lived here, they’re all gone now. Most of them will never come back. The neighbourhood died overnight.”

  They walked down the street. Milton saw species of vegetation that had no business being in an area like this: crepe myrtle, black willow and golden rain trees garlanded with vines. There were weeds as high as basketball hoops. There was lantana, oleander, and oxalis.

  Izzy saw that he was looking. “It grew fast. The soil’s rich from the alluvium in the Mississippi, and the climate’s perfect. They’ve had botanists down here to look at some of it, try to explain why it started to grow.”

  “They didn’t try to clear it?”

  “Sure, they tried. The city appointed a contractor to clear it; he turned out to be a felon. They appointed another; he took the money but did a poor job. They’ve got a crew of twelve ex-cons, going around now to try to keep on top of it. But as soon as it’s cleared, it starts to grow again. You leave a lot untended for three months and it’ll be thick with knee-high weeds. After five months, you’ll see saplings. The only way to reclaim the area is to put people back in here again. You been in the city yet? The centre?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You’re not here for Mardi Gras?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Wait ’til you get up there. You wouldn’t know Katrina even happened. The oldest, wealthiest districts—the whitest ones—they’re all on higher ground. The poorer neighbourhoods, where the native New Orleanians live, all those are below sea level. You know the difference between the French Quarter and this area around here?”

  He said that he didn’t.

  “Nine feet,” she said.

  They reached the end of the row and turned again. Milton saw that they were following a long, rectangular route. There were more wrecked and deserted houses on this stretch of the road, but, as they reached the junction and turned to the right, they were back on Salvation Row.

  “And then we get to this,” she said proudly. “Better than it ever was before. All ecologically sound, the houses generate most of their own power from the solar panels, the carbon offsetting means that there’s no footprint at all.”

  “It’s amazing, Isadora.”

  “Izzy,” she corrected. “You sound like my father.”

  They reached the first house at this end of the block. The siding was painted red, the colour a flamboyant counterpoint to the bright blue sky.

  “You asked about the first family we moved in?”

  He nodded.

  “Come on,” she said, turning onto the path. “I’ll introduce you.”

  Chapter Ten

  IZZY DIDN’T knock on the door. She opened it, stepped inside and shouted out, “I’m home.”

  There was a moment of silence and then the sound of slippered feet shuffling and slapping across the floor. The d
oor to the right opened, and Solomon Bartholomew was standing there.

  Izzy went over and embraced her father, and then, stepping back, she turned so that he could see Milton waiting on the stoop.

  “Papa,” she said, “there’s someone here come to say hello to you and Momma.”

  “That right?” The old man fumbled in his breast pocket. “Let me get my spectacles. I can’t see a damn thing without ’em.”

  “They’re on your head,” Izzy said indulgently.

  Her father patted his crown, found the glasses and slid them down onto his nose. He squinted through them for a moment, saw Milton, crumpled his nose as he tried to remember if he recognised him and then his eyes went wide with surprise. “Well, I’ll be. It’s Mr. Smith, isn’t it?”

  “You remember him?”

  “Remember him? I ain’t likely to forget no part of that day, child. Of course, I remember him.”

  He looked much older, every day of the nine years. His skin was striated with a host of tiny wrinkles, his hair had turned from grey to white, and he looked smaller, wizened. He was dressed impeccably, just as before, with a shirt and tie, a comfortable-looking cardigan, and beautifully pressed trousers.

  Milton shook his hand. “It’s good to see you again, Mr. Bartholomew.”

  “What happened to your friend?” Solomon asked. “He make it?”

  “He did. They got him to hospital, fixed up his leg. He had broken ribs, too, and a fractured skull. They said if it wasn’t for what Alexander did for him, he would most likely have died. Even if he had survived, he would definitely have lost the leg.”

  The news was good, and Solomon nodded at it, but the mention of his son brought a troubled cast to the old man’s face. “What you doing back in town?” he said, evidently moving the conversation away from that direction.

  “Just passing through.”

  “You on business again?”

  “A little different this time.”

  There came the sound of a door closing from the rear of the house and then footsteps padding towards them. Elsie Bartholomew came through the door into the hallway. She looked older, too, moving a little more carefully than Milton remembered.