AHMM, July-August 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Once again, he carefully inserted his slim body into the canoe as it bobbed just below the second floor fire escape landing. Ernest held the paddle across his hairy legs and let fly a low whistle as he gazed at what had been Paris Avenue—still was, under all the toxic brown water. He sniffed the air, made a face.

  Though he'd chucked his cigarettes two years earlier, Ernest had a smoker's puckered mouth and squint around the eyes that gave him an eager, inquisitive look. He squinted now, trying to make out what was left of the strip mall he'd frequented for years. Coffee shop, cleaners, drugstore, pizza parlor. Only the long black roof that capped those establishments was visible, floating in the warm water like the inverted hull of Noah's ark.

  He'd never heard a quiet this quiet before. No birds sang. Not even a mosquito buzzed.

  The whole damn city had cut out. Sure, on the radio he heard about folks in the Superdome. Their cries didn't carry this far, not even over water. Here in Gentilly—one of the city's oldest suburbs, quarter mile from Lake Pontchartrain, or where the lake should start—there wasn't a creature stirring. This was alone.

  Alone was his comfort zone. Only dying scared him, and he figured if he quit smoking by fifty, he'd cheat the devil for a long time. Cigarettes killed his dad. His mom, with her bad diet, worse attitude, and her unwillingness even to walk around the block, was still going strong at eighty-five. Her lazy Energizer Bunny act fueled his hopes for a long life.

  The lotion he slathered on his face kept him looking young, despite the years of smoking. He also made it a habit not to do much of anything in the sun, or out of it. He showered often. Bacteria could kill you sure as cancer.

  Water kissed the canoe's sides. He sat straight, aware he'd been hunching his shoulders, mouth open. Awe, an emotion he never sought to register, was hardly ever warranted. Ernest shut his mouth.

  But he couldn't help it if his eyes bugged out. The scene was freaking unbelievable. Though he'd ventured forth the day before, he still felt like he was paddling into a movie thought up by Rod Serling.

  The water near his apartment building was splotched with gasoline rainbows. He'd never felt good about living next to a gas station. Couldn't those underground tanks explode?

  Didn't matter now; couldn't happen now.

  He dipped the paddle, pulled hard to escape the gasoline smell, and glided across Paris Avenue, past what had been the grassy neutral ground planted with oaks and magnolias. The upper, visible parts of those trees looked stunned, as if they'd flung their arms up in an old Western, surrendering to Mother Nature. Ya got me!

  The heat was also a shock. New Orleans’ summers were hell, but today it seemed like Earth had switched places with Mercury. Good thing he'd lifted the sunscreen he'd found in Missy Golden's apartment down the hall. Lucky he lived on the second floor too. It'd been worth climbing stairs all these years, because now, unlike many others, he hadn't lost any of his worldly possessions. The few things he valued, his baseball cards, his coin collection, were dry. His dad always said never live on the bottom floor if you can live up top.

  He floated past the Rite Aid—formerly a K&B, and before that, a place called Crown Drugs—where he habitually bought pints of whiskey. How strange, to sit a foot below the building's roofline. He pictured the bottles inside, unattended. Would they float? Probably not. More likely, they were just waiting on their accustomed shelves, looking for eternity to roll around, or for the City Fathers to get the pumps going.

  Fat chance.

  Once the water went down some, maybe he'd dog-paddle in, nab a few. They'd be thrown out anyway.

  "Today we'll take a little cruise,” Ernest announced. His voice sounded flat, swallowed up by the universal quiet. He paddled. “A little cruise.” He laughed then, and turned to give the roof of his beloved drugstore a last glance.

  On its peak, like a stone gargoyle, perched a huge bird—black, with a bald, red head. Ernest couldn't make out much detail, but the general shape of a vulture, or buzzard, was definitely there. This was no overweight crow.

  He shook his head as if to knock the image of the vulture out of it and began paddling west, down Robert E. Lee, toward Lakeview. He'd never seen one of those birds in New Orleans, though this city, famous for garbage even before the storm, seemed the perfect place for vultures to hang out.

  When he was a kid and his parents drove downriver to visit cousins in the country, he'd seen buzzards hopping away from roadkill with impatient gusto as his dad's chrome-mouthed Chrysler charged toward them. But he'd never seen a buzzard in New Orleans, much less a vulture.

  That ugly bird on the strip mall's roof was the only living thing he'd seen since Mike Doucet bowed out, except for Missy Golden's aquarium fish, which she'd asked him to feed. And he had, just after he lifted the tube of sunblock—the fancy, dermatologist's office kind—and several gallon bottles of water, and a few pairs of Missy's gold earrings, one set with rubies.

  He was glad the other tenants had taken their pets along when they evacuated, since he would have felt an inner push to take care of them. More important pursuits might have suffered as a result.

  As each tenant left, they expressed the same idea. “Probably another false alarm, Ernie. See ya in three days.” If nothing else, the power would go out, never any fun in August. At worst, it'd be off for a week. They said, “If you're staying, could you keep an eye on things, Ernie?"

  Yeah. Glad to.

  Paddling away, he hazarded a last look back at the roof. The vulture was gone. Probably'd been a hallucination brought on by gasoline fumes.

  The sun steamed the watery road. “Brutal,” he said. He thought of football practice in high school, that one time he'd gone out for it, late August. It'd been so hot, Ernest was downright pleased and proud not to make the team.

  This heat was much worse.

  After paddling several blocks, he picked up one of the jugs of water at his feet. He drank greedily, then sloshed some over his head. It trickled through his pale, oily hair, down his neck. Still, he felt the heat. The water surrounding him had an acrid smell, no longer of gasoline. Fishy, with a touch of sewerage, and not a breeze stirred to carry the aroma away.

  His sweat made him feel dirty. Ernest showered often and wished he could shower now. But even if the plumbing worked, the water would be full of this toxic crap.

  A few more blocks and he'd make it to Bayou St. John, where he could paddle across to reach the low bridge that spanned the Orleans Canal. Maybe the land on the other side would be dry. He could stash the canoe, cross the bridge, walk half a mile, and be back in his old neighborhood, where he grew up.

  His mother had sold the house just three years ago and moved in with his sister and her husband in Dallas. Ernest hadn't gone near the place since.

  Would their old house be flooded like all the empty, gaping houses he was passing now? Big deal. He wasn't interested in taking a walk, or a row, down memory lane. His goal was to get to old man Wartburg's.

  Wartburg. “Mean old German,” his mother called him, even though he wasn't first generation. Still, he looked like he could be one of those retired SS soldiers that those Nazi hunters used to track down.

  Wartburg lived four houses down on the corner. The old German's wife—silver-haired, always incredibly placid-looking, only venturing outside to smell her roses—died several years back, but the old man was still kicking, had to be at least ninety. He would have evacuated like everyone else, gone to his daughter's, most probably.

  Breaking into Wartburg's would give Ernest more joy than had strolling into any of those rich lakefront castles he'd visited yesterday.

  Nasty old cuss. If you were riding your bike and cut across the tiny triangle of grass that defined Wartburg's corner, he'd turn a hose on you. Fat cigar in his mouth, he was always lurking. His hair, a mean wiry gray; his slate blue eyes, opaque, stubborn. Some people frowned; Wartburg taught Ernest what a genuine scowl was.

  Maybe he'd never really hosed anyone for cutting across that bit
of grass. Maybe he only scowled. The message came through: You were dust, and one of these days, Mr. Wartburg would get you. No one visited his door on Halloween. If he gave out candy, it'd be poison for sure. No one dared play a trick on Wartburg, either.

  Ernest had been forced to wear braces on his legs until he was ten. His mom's doing: She got the idea that Ernest's legs were turning the wrong way and found a quack doctor who fitted Ernest with orthopedic shoes and clunky braces that circled his legs to the knees. His dad used to help him with them, clamping them on in the morning before school and pulling them off at night. Ernest sensed his dad knew the braces weren't necessary, but he was such a wuss, he did whatever Ernest's mom said.

  The kids at school treated him like a polio victim. No, worse than that, since Robert Kaufmann, who had a brace on one leg and the heel of that shoe built up like one of Frankenstein's clodhoppers, already filled the role of the school's polio victim. And the other kids liked Robert Kaufmann. They thought him special, regarded him with awe. But Ernest—not even the bullies paid him any attention. He was a crip not even worth beating up. Those damn braces. They cut the flesh just below his knees, too, if he tried to walk fast.

  Ernest and his dad used to work on several collections: stamps, baseball cards, and coins. Documenting those items was one of the few things Ernest did with his dad. When they worked on the collections, his dad would smoke. Sometimes, he'd turn the pages of their stamp album and bestow an appreciative smile upon the rows and rows of identical Abraham Lincoln profiles.

  Ernest preferred the coin collection. His dad would bring change home from work that Ernest would sift through, searching for dates they lacked in their blue cardboard books. How he loved plugging the empty round holes with the correct penny, nickel, dime. Even quarters they did, and half dollars.

  One of the few aphorisms his dad ever uttered was, “Don't clean ‘em. If you do, they lose value.” So Ernest kept looking until he found the cleanest, best preserved coin of each category. The dirty leftovers, he threw in a jar to be traded off later to some stupid coin collector kid.

  Mr. Wartburg had heard about his neighbors’ interest in coins. That had to be why they'd been invited over. Ernest had stepped into Mr. Wartburg's house only once in his life, but that day was just about the most memorable occasion of Ernest's life.

  Wartburg's house had a windowless room at its very center. He boasted to Ernest's dad about how he'd taken a little off of every other room to create this inner sanctum. He'd done all the work himself. The door to the windowless room melded with the den's paneling.

  Mr. Wartburg unlocked the camouflaged door, pushed it open. A light clicked on, revealing a square space the size of a small guest room, but which seemed more glorious than any Ernest had ever seen. A desk with a big round magnifier clamped to it bordered one wall. The other three were laddered with shelves full of coin books, even coins from Europe. Lower down, long, narrow drawers housed the real prizes of his collection.

  An arrogant glint sparking his eyes, Mr. Wartburg showed them many amazing coins that day, coins Ernest had studied in his Directory of U.S. Coins with longing, knowing he'd never find these rarities in his father's pockets.

  A measly nickel impressed him most. Mr. Wartburg actually owned one of those 1937 D buffalo nickels that got stamped out with only three legs on the buffalo.

  "D'ja see that, Dad?” he said after they left. “He's got the three-legged buff. Never thought I'd see one of them in my whole life."

  His dad smiled a sad smile and pulled a red cellophane ribbon to liberate his pack of Lucky Strikes. “He's got the 1916 double die obverse too.” He squeezed the words out, as if this observation gave him great pain.

  Mr. Wartburg never invited them back. He scowled just the same whenever Ernest rounded the corner on his bike. Ernest's enthusiasm for coins had made no difference. Wartburg wasn't interested in trading with the likes of them; he'd only invited them over to show off.

  With an angry spurt of energy, Ernest shoved the paddle in the water. “That was not Mr. Rogers's neighborhood,” he said aloud. His laugh immediately died against the ugly water and cruel, hot, baby blue sky.

  Didn't matter how hot it was, how bad the water smelled, how much Ernest hated sweat, or even how tired he'd be of rowing by the time he reached his destination. He was going to Wartburg's, and he'd pocket all the coins he could manage, the ones from those slim, slide-out drawers, including the ancient gold dollars with the Seated Liberty. Above all, he'd nab the three-legged Buffalo.

  Though not the most precious of the collection, the lame buff drew him. Some coins were valuable not only because so few existed, but because they were anomalies. Mutants interested him. The buffalo's missing leg made him special.

  Ernest was so lost in thinking about the visit to Mr. Wartburg's house that he was surprised when the canoe bumped into the rising slant of the Orleans Canal bridge. The bridge's smooth concrete arch poked three feet above the water. He disembarked and slid the boat over the bridge's top section. Even before he climbed out, he saw the destruction on the other side. Lakeview was flooded as well. Miles of ruined homes stretched before him.

  Cars must have floated for a time, since many had landed in cockeyed positions. A silver Camry that looked brand new see-sawed over a Quaid fence. Another car, one of those outmoded Oldsmobile Supremes, was stuck in a mimosa tree.

  "Holy moly,” Ernest exclaimed. He knew this street well, but could hardly get his bearings. At the intersection of Fillmore and Argonne, he recognized a home on one corner. The couple who lived there always kept its terraced lawn neatly mowed. At Christmas, they put up tasteful decorations, nothing like the ratty wreath and limply strung lights his parents used to come up with. Now, a huge leather sofa was wedged in the picture window that used to frame their Christmas tree.

  Whenever Ernest passed that house, he'd think about what a completely different person he'd be if he'd grown up there, where everything was clean and made sense.

  His mom fussed about keeping a clean home, but rarely did a lick of housework. The garden was full of weeds. His dad hardly ever mowed. Neighbors gave them dirty looks.

  He squinted at the house and let out a moan. He hated New Orleans, but seeing this particular house ruined didn't make him feel very good. More acutely than before, he felt he was the only human being in the world.

  Just as he was ready to long for the sight of another living creature, a green canoe rounded the corner a block down. A skinny guy was paddling, and a boy about twelve sat on the seat behind him.

  "Hey!” the man called.

  "Hey there.” Ernest wished he could go back to being the only person on earth again.

  "Nice day for boating, what ya say."

  This guy, late thirties, was an affable type who wanted to talk. Ernest gave the required chuckle, ready to cut it short.

  "You stayed,” the guy said.

  Like duh. Ernest smiled and said, “You too."

  "Me and my son. Wife left Saturday with our daughter. I figured Roy and me'd stick it out. We got a two-story, so no problem when the water came up. But never in a million years did I think anything like this would happen."

  The man was just twenty feet off. Ernest wasn't keen on him coming closer. Not that he had anything to hide: just three gallons of water, the life preserver, and these big old rubber waders he'd found in Mike's closet. And most important—not one, but two flashlights.

  "I got a two-story too.” Ernest wiped his face with a handkerchief. “This heat's bad. Can't stand it."

  The man nodded. “Roy and I are getting out tomorrow, one way or another. People're being rescued, flown out on Coast Guard copters. But they're being damned slow about it. Folks with only one-story houses—the ones who stayed—they had to chop out their attics with an ax. They're stranded on rooftops. Once in awhile, you'll hear a helicopter. If one comes this way, I'll flag him. Or I can always paddle to the parish line. Did'ya hear? Metairie is fine. No flooding over there. Least, no
t in most places."

  "That so.” Man, was this guy a talker.

  "I don't want to leave,” the kid piped up. “Hey, mister, we fished in our back yard this morning,” he called to Ernest, as if this were some great feat he should be congratulated on.

  The father said, “If no one rescues us, I'll take him to Metairie. That's a few miles paddling, to the 17th Street Canal. Cross that bridge and then we're on dry land."

  "Right,” said Ernest.

  "Only, then what? No transportation. I guess somebody would help us get to Baton Rouge. That's where my wife is."

  The kid said, “Let's stay and tough it out, Dad."

  "Sure,” said Ernest. “Someone'll get you to Baton Rouge.” Yeah, like what did this guy expect, limousine service? Ernest said to himself, hoping this dope would move on.

  "Let's tough it out,” the boy repeated, no doubt imitating something his dad had said days ago.

  "Can you believe this?” the man said, looking around.

  "Yeah. Pinch me."

  "Roy here thinks it's a lark. The whole first floor of our house is a loss, and he's loving it."

  The boy grinned. “No school."

  Ernest said, “He'll have stories to tell his grandkids."

  "Live around here?” the man asked, slitting one eye.

  "Used to. I'm on the other side of Orleans Canal, but I told my mom I'd come out here to check her house—my old home, where I grew up.” He put on a nostalgic face. “Maybe get some old pictures out, whatever I can."

  The man nodded. “I asked, ‘cause you know, you can't be too careful. I heard there's guys going around in boats, stealing from flooded homes."

  "Yeah?” Ernest tilted his head sideways. “What's to gain? These houses are ruined."

  "Heard it on the radio. Coast Guard's going house to house, marking every door with a big orange X, checking for bodies. They put a zero in the lower quadrant if they find no bodies, put other numbers in the other segments. Don't know what those mean. While they were doing this, house to house, they said they found a guy in a kayak paddling around Lakeview, not two miles from here. Guy says he's a veterinarian come down from Connecticut to save pets. Connecticut, yet! Turns out he was nothing like that. They found all this jewelry in his kayak. Confiscated it."