by Mark Dawson
“Jambalaya,” she said. “Means jumbled in French. You liked it?”
Milton gestured down at the empty bowl. “Delicious. What was the spice?”
“Onion powder, garlic, oregano, basil, thyme, lots of paprika. Lots of cayenne pepper, too.”
“It had a kick.”
“And I toned it down for you, too,” she said. “Didn’t know how you like your spice.”
Milton thanked her again. She got up to prepare dessert, and Solomon leaned over the table, his fingers steepled. “What you make of what Izzy’s been doing?”
“I think it’s amazing.”
He turned to his daughter and reached for her hand. “My little girl’s done something pretty wonderful, right?”
“More than wonderful,” Milton said. “Incredible.”
Izzy waved it off, but Milton could see that it filled her with happiness to be acknowledged like this by her father.
“The city wouldn’t have done nothing,” Solomon said. “Still ain’t doing much.”
“I’m not defending them,” Izzy interposed, “but, the way they saw it, it’s just a question of math. All kinds of folk moved into the city in the sixties and seventies. City got up to nearly 700,000 people at one point. They expanded into marshland that everyone said at the time was no good for habitation. They were the poorer areas, right, like around here, and it was those areas that got flooded when the levees broke. A year after Katrina, the population dropped back down to 200,000. But the city’s footprint, since the seventies, had increased by more than ten percent. The mayor didn’t think a city built for three times as many people could maintain that kind of size.”
Elsie’s face took on a distasteful cast. “We don’t mention the mayor in this house. Man’s a low-down crook, you ask me.”
Izzy continued, “They were asking whether fewer taxpayers could afford to maintain services like garbage removal, policing, sewer pipes and miles of streets, plenty of them still underwater from the flood. Decided they couldn’t. Economics, they said. I don’t know if that was wrong or right.”
“Yeah, you do, baby,” her father said. “You know.”
“So they just left them to rot, and the people who were forced out, the ones who wanted to come back home, well, that was just bad luck. I didn’t think it was right to just give up. So we started Build It Up.”
“She says ‘we,’” Solomon said. “She means ‘I.’ ‘I’ started it.”
She shushed him.
“How did you get into it?” Milton said. “You were studying law before the storm.”
She shrugged. “Gave that up. Didn’t see the point of it no more, not afterwards. But, in a funny way, it’s been useful. There’s red tape to deal with on a project like this. I’ve saved thousands of dollars by doing that myself. And then there’s the court case.”
This was what she had referred to earlier, the trouble. “You haven’t really mentioned that.”
She looked at her parents with worry.
Solomon waved her concern away. “Go on. You tell him, girl. We know you got it covered. We ain’t worried.”
She nodded and then frowned, searching for the right place to start. Eventually she said, “All the land I showed you today, Salvation Row, that’s what we’ve done so far. The way we work it, we get the money together to buy a plot, we clear it, then we build. We can turn a house around, start to finish, in three months. The families pay us, we take the money for the house and put it into the next plot of land. It’s all cheap round here, no one else is doing anything with it. We could keep doing it until there was no land left to build on. And there’s a lot of demand for houses now. People who had to move out, they’ve seen the places we’ve put up, they’ve seen they’re nice, they want to move back again. We could sign up fifty families tomorrow, no problem.” She finished her coffee and rattled the cup as she placed it back on the saucer.
“So?”
“So, about six months ago, we find out that this developer is interested in all this land. They offered to buy the houses. Everyone told them no. They came back, offered more than the plots are worth. The Joneses said yes, needed the money for their boy’s medical costs, but most people still held out. We just moved back. Some of these families, they’ve been here sixty years, and they don’t want to move. I couldn’t understand why they’d be interested. No one else is interested in buying land down here, and then these guys come in. They’ve bought fifty acres all around us. Didn’t make sense. So I dug into it a bit and found out that this corporation wants to put up a mall. The kind of place with shops and cinemas, the whole nine yards.”
Izzy frowned again. “We found out two months ago that the only way they can make their development work is to put their access roads right through the houses we just built. We own the land, but the city thinks the mall is more important than the houses, and they’re insisting we sell.”
“Can they do that?”
“We told them that we wouldn’t sell, so they’ve gone to court to get an order that’ll make us.”
“They can do that?”
She nodded. “It’s called eminent domain. That’s the case I’ve been fighting. There’s no way I’m going to let them do it. After everything we’ve done, the work we’ve put into these houses, just to let them drive a bulldozer through them? No way. That happens over my dead body.”
She spoke more and more passionately, her eyes flashing with anger. Her father nodded, his face stern and resolute, and her mother reached across to take her hand. Milton didn’t know what to say. He had no experience in the law, but he knew what was right and what was wrong.
“Can you fight it?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I’m doing it myself, so the cost is as low as I can make it. But, even so, there are experts and fees to pay. The money won’t last forever. And they have deep pockets. I’ll make it as difficult and expensive for them as I can. We’ll see what happens.”
“You haven’t had any time to yourself for weeks,” Elsie said. “You work late, weekends—”
“You know the worst thing?” she interrupted. “It’s not that, or the stress. It’s that it takes me away from running the charity. It stops me from working on new houses, finding new plots, speaking to families who want to move in. We’re not a big team. It’s me and whoever else is prepared to work for nothing. If I’m not running things, everything will stop. We’re already losing momentum.”
Milton heard the door open and, as he looked up quizzically, saw the concern on the faces of Solomon and Elsie. He had his back to the kitchen door and, as he turned back, it opened.
Alexander Bartholomew came inside.
Milton remembered him from that night in the storm. He had aged badly. He could only have been in his late twenties now, but he could have passed for someone ten years older. He was thin, wiry like a speed freak. His hair was a mess, a straggled ’fro that was shot through with grey.
“Alexander,” Elsie said.
“Mom.”
“You okay?”
“Just passing through. Thought I’d come say hi.”
“You didn’t say—”
“I can’t put my head through the door, say hello to my folks?”
His tone was jocular, but there was aggression and threat behind the words. He was slurring, too, drunk or high. Milton started to feel uncomfortable. The atmosphere had soured. It was obvious that there were developments within the family that he still had to understand.
Alexander walked across to the kitchen counter. Elsie had prepared a Key lime pie for dessert and, without asking, he took a spoon and clawed off a chunk from the edge. Elsie frowned, more with discomfort than disapproval, and Milton decided, for sure, that Alexander Bartholomew had taken a turn for the worse since the time he had last seen him.
“You remember John Smith?” Solomon said.
Alexander put the spoon into his mouth and chewed with laconic hostility as he looked down at Milton. “No,” he said. “Refresh my memory.”
>
“During Katrina, him and his friend—”
“Oh, shit, him. Yeah, sure, I remember.”
Milton stood and extended his hand. “Hello.”
Alexander sucked the spoon clean. He left Milton’s hand hanging.
“What did you do after Katrina? You stick around?”
“No,” Milton said.
“Flew straight out of here, right? Forgot all about us?”
“No. I didn’t forget.”
“Bullshit.”
“Alexander,” Elsie said severely, looking at Milton in apology.
“Nah, Mom, things like that, they gotta be said. What’s this like for you, you here to look at how the poor black folk are managing? Like a bit of misery with your tourism?”
“That’s enough,” Solomon said, pressing his hands down on the table so that he could get his feet beneath him.
Alexander smiled, sudden and surprising, and pressed his hand on his father’s shoulder to stop him from rising. “S’alright,” he said, slurring. “I was just pulling his chain, is all. How you doing, buddy?”
“I’m well,” Milton said.
“What do you want?” Solomon asked his son.
“Told you. I was in the neighbourhood. Thought I’d come over and say hi to my mom and pops.”
“You don’t ever just do that,” Elsie chided him sadly.
“Well, you know, I’m busy—”
“Doing what?” Solomon interrupted. “Last time I looked, you weren’t doing shit.”
“Thinking about going back to finish my studies,” he said, pretending hard to be hurt. It was an obvious lie. Milton saw through it the moment the words came out of his mouth, but Solomon’s face opened a little and showed a little hope. Milton felt a prickle of anger that Alexander was toying with him that way.
He could see that Izzy wasn’t fooled. Elsie wasn’t, either. “What do you really want, Alex, like I needed to ask?”
“I was hoping, maybe you could advance me a little cash. I’m behind on my rent. Landlord say he’s gonna throw me out if I don’t get straight with him, and, that happens, there ain’t no way I’m going to be able to think about getting that qualification.”
Solomon reached into the pocket of his slacks and pulled out his wallet. “How much you want?”
“No,” Izzy said, standing so quickly that she knocked over her empty glass.
Alexander turned to her, his face dark with anger. “Back off.”
She ignored him. “No, Pops. Put it away.”
“I said back—”
“You know what he’s going to spend it on as well as I do. You don’t pay rent, Alex. The places you been living, they don’t charge, least not for that, do they?”
“What would you know about the places I been living?”
“I’ve seen enough of them. I built houses where some of them used to be.”
Milton felt exquisitely awkward. He had expected an interesting evening, one that had the potential to be pleasant, and now he was in the middle of a personal family argument. He knew that the Bartholomews were proud people, it was obvious from their hospitality and the way that they worked at their house, and he knew that this would be terribly embarrassing for them. Knowing that, and that his presence made it so much worse for them, made him feel embarrassed, too.
He stood. “I should be going,” he said apologetically.
“No,” Elsie said firmly. “Please—sit down. We haven’t finished our meal yet. Alexander’s the one who needs to be leaving.”
Alexander looked at her for a long moment, and Milton feared that he was going to defy her. He started to consider what he would do if he became violent. He would have to do something. Alexander was scrawny and would be simple enough to subdue, but would that just make things worse?
Alexander sneered at them. “Fuck it,” he said. “Fuck you, all y’all. You prefer to have your dinner with someone like that, someone who don’t give a good goddamn fuck about you, you go right ahead, it don’t mean nothing to me.”
“Mind your language in this house,” Solomon said.
“Yeah, and fuck you too. I’ll find the money somewhere else.”
With that, he turned on his heel and left the room. There was a pause, the sound of something soft being thrown to the floor, and then the slamming of the door.
Milton remembered. His jacket was hanging out there, and his wallet was inside it. He knew, without even having to check, that Alexander had lifted it. Izzy went into the hall, and Milton followed behind. The jacket was on the floor. She picked it up and gave it to him. It was lighter, and he didn’t need to check.
“He hasn’t taken anything?”
Milton shook his head. “Nothing in it to take,” he said.
#
THE ATMOSPHERE was subdued after that. Solomon tried to lighten the mood by telling the story of his friend who said that he had seen a four-foot alligator drinking from a broken water hydrant on Choctaw. Elsie managed a laugh, reminding her husband that his acquaintance had been smoking weed for years and had once sworn an affidavit that he had been abducted and experimented upon by aliens. Solomon chuckled that that was true, but that, on this occasion, he believed him. They tried hard to remove the stain of Alexander’s visit, but it was something that couldn’t easily be forgotten.
They cleared the table. Milton offered to wash up, but Elsie would hear none of it. She called her husband to help, and the two of them shepherded Milton and their daughter out into the lounge, but not before Izzy snagged a couple of long-necked beers from the fridge.
They went outside, closing the door after them and sitting down on the wooden porch with their backs up against the wall.
“You want one?” she said, holding the cold bottles up.
Milton felt the usual quiver, the waver in his resolve. It would be nice, after all, to share a drink with a pretty girl. That was what civilised people did after a pleasant meal, after all. Right? And then there came the persuasive suggestions—you’ll be all right, it’s just one beer, you’ll be better company with a little booze inside you, it’ll help you ignore the voice telling you that you’re not worth her time—and he moved a little closer to saying yes. But he had been concentrating on his sobriety for the last few months, that had been the purpose behind his long trek through the wilderness in Michigan and Minnesota, and, for now at least, he was buttressed well enough to recognise the danger.
“No,” he said.
“What do you mean, no?”
“I don’t drink.”
“Not ever?”
“I’ve got a problem with it,” he admitted, surprised at his own candour. “With drink. It got out of control a year or two after I was here last. I had to stop completely to get it sorted out. It’s been a while now.”
She looked down at the bottles as if embarrassed that she had brought them out.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You have a drink. It’s fine. I don’t mind at all. I’ll have a smoke. That’s my vice now.”
She popped the top of one of the bottles and took a long slug of beer. She finished half the bottle, wiped the back of her hand across her lips, and stood it up next to her.
“Gimme one,” Izzy said, eyeing the cigarettes.
Milton opened the pack and she pulled one out, putting it to her lips and ducking her head so that Milton could light it for her. The flame of his Zippo glittered in her dark eyes.
“Stupid habit,” she said, sucking down and then blowing out a languorous jet of blue-grey smoke.
Milton watched her. He waited for her to bring up what had just happened.
It didn’t take very long.
“Look—I’m sorry about that.”
“Alexander? Don’t worry.”
“My brother’s in a mess. He’s not doing so good. He’s…” She paused, putting the bottle to her lips and taking another swig as she composed her next words. “You know he was training to be a vet?”
“Yes. I remember.”
“H
e only had another year to study, and he would have graduated. That’s a good career right there. That’s a profession. But just after Katrina, after what happened to Mom and Pop and the house, he went off the rails. Totally lost his head. He always drank a lot, too much, probably, but he started to drink all the time. He missed his classes because he was hungover or still out drinking. We tried to get him to see what he was doing to himself was crazy, but he didn’t care. It was as if he wanted to sabotage everything.”
“He didn’t want to help with the charity?”
She shook her head. “That made it worse. We started to do good work and I think it made him feel more of a failure. I asked him to work with me, once, and he just laughed. ‘Why would I want anything to do with that?’ he said.” She mimicked the way he spoke now, the low drawl of aggression. “‘Dumbass niggers too lazy to pull themselves up, always be looking for a helping hand.’ I told him that he was out of line, and we had a big argument. Papa got involved, that made it even worse, and then he left. I haven’t seen him much since then.”
She finished the first beer, stood it neatly on the step, and took another of Milton’s cigarettes.
“Where is he?”
“Living in a crack house in Raceland.”
“Crack?”
“Got in with a bad crowd. Started doing drugs six months ago from what I can work out.”
“Where’s Raceland?”
“An hour west of NOLA. Why?”
“Why don’t I go and talk to him?”
She looked at him with cynicism. “Seriously?”
“I could.”
“Good of you to offer, John. But, no offence, what are you going to say? Seriously? You saw the way he looked at you.”
“I’ve got my own problems, just like he does. Compulsions.” He nodded at her empty bottle. “Sometimes you just need someone who speaks the same language.”
“He won’t listen to you.”
“No, maybe not. But it’s worth a try.”
He thought that she would thank him, tell him it was pointless, fob him off in some way or another, but, instead, she reached into her pocket and took out one of her business cards and a pen. BUILD IT UP! was printed on one side. She turned it over, and next to the lines of text that said ISADORA BARTHOLOMEW - EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, she wrote down an address on Brocato Lane, Raceland.
