He became aware that Gwen had fallen silent. “You haven't heard a word I said,” she accused him.
"Not true. I heard everything."
"Meaning you heard but you didn't listen. In your own world as usual, dammit. What are you thinking about now?"
"Fried catfish. Good old Ictalurus furcatus. That joint down on the river still open? I won't be here long, so let's make the most of it."
They spent the next couple of hours eating good fish and drinking bad wine, gossiping and gazing through tinted windows at the curving Mississippi, a vast brown anaconda with countless glittering scales now touched by the setting sun. Small tugs muscled enormous barge trains upstream against the current, and flights of small birds flashed low over the water. Above the bar a TV blared sports bulletins about local teams and updates on the hurricane nearing New Orleans. They asked a waitress to turn it down, for despite the casualness of their talk, something seemed to be happening between them—something both old and new.
That night Gwen assigned him to her guest room. Then changed her mind, and just about the time he was getting sleepy, knocked at his door and joined him in bed. Nothing but snuggling happened then, but he woke before dawn ready for action and feeling strongly that he'd better not waste his opportunity. He tickled her awake and found her agreeable. So they became lovers again, after a lapse of forty years, on the solid adult grounds of long affection and close proximity.
* * * *
After his unaccustomed exertion that Sunday morning, Jim went back to sleep and slept long and woke late.
At first he didn't know where he was. A pink sky hovered over him, yet a bedside clock said ten-twenty. Okay, the sky was actually a pink tester, and a roseate symphony of swags, ruffles, and other femstuff surrounded and enveloped him. Soft-spoken Dot hadn't cared for furbelows, but pushy, domineering Gwen doted on them.
Speaking of Gwen, her side of the bed was not only empty but cool. Between the double hillocks raised by his feet, Jim next contemplated a TV gazing blankly at him from a marble-topped table. He felt pretty blank himself, knowing there was something he needed to check up on, but for several minutes unable to remember what it was. Oh yeah, Katrina.
He fumbled at the bedside table, found the remote and turned the set on. The first thing he saw was a satellite image of the Gulf and the two-bladed red symbol of the hurricane, now labeled Category 5. The image was suddenly replaced by the city's mayor, a milk-chocolate gent with waxed and gleaming head, ordering a mandatory evacuation.
Jim pulled pillows randomly behind his back to prop himself up. The damn thing was a five. Of course it'd weaken when it hit the continental shelf—they almost always did—but back home it'd be Betsy all over again. Roof tiles would go flying, trees would fall, the lines would go down, the power would fail. The city might take weeks to recover. Thank God his house was sound and strong, a proven veteran of many storms.
Goddamn, he thought, I wish I'd emptied that fridge. Had he brought enough clean clothes? Would he have to sample Napoleonic fashions at Wal-Mart?
He stumbled into the bathroom, not even bothering to grimace over the pink toilet cozy, the pink tiles, the shower curtain decorated with pink bunnies and duckies. Heading down to breakfast, he found Gwen in the kitchen, the room where she actually spent her days, kissed her good-morning, and got a smile and a moderately bawdy wink in return. Her maid Olivia, an ebony woman of middle age who worked two hours on Sunday morning, cooked him an enormous breakfast of ham and eggs and biscuits and everything he wasn't supposed to eat, and Jim pigged out because, after all, he needed to keep his strength up in these trying times.
When Olivia departed to make the beds—beds because Gwen had rumpled her own, to preserve appearances—she commandeered him for church and they set forth in her Audi. Bonaparte's Protestants worshipped in marble Greco-Roman temples, and so, paradoxically, did its handful of Jews. The priest (genus Episcopalianus) gave a fluent sermon on the Kingdom of Heaven, which unlike the kingdoms of the Earth operated on the pure generosity of a God whose essence was love. Then he offered a brief prayer for the people of the Gulf Coast, so soon to feel the wrath of Nature, whose ways for some reason did not mirror those of its Creator.
Jim enjoyed the rest of the day, mainly because he wasn't on the road. From time to time Gwen turned on a wall-mounted flat-screen TV that was one of the newest gadgets in her all-purpose kitchen, and they watched repeated scenes of orating weatherpersons, the tormented Gulf, and the impacted highways leading away from it. The phone rang several times: people who ran bed-and-breakfasts were hunting rooms for new arrivals they couldn't accommodate. Gwen hesitated to take in strangers, but finally accepted an NOPD cop on his honeymoon, and in due course a thick-bodied young man named Tommy Leboeuf and his new bride, Lydia—who (Jim thought privately) looked less like a blushing bride than a hooker from a Texarkana truckstop—showed up in a shiny new pink-champagne-colored Cadillac.
The Leboeufs went straight to bed. To make room for them, Jim moved into Gwen's room, murmuring as he unpacked for the second time that he hoped he wasn't destroying her reputation as a Christian woman. “Honey,” she replied, “desperate times require desperate measures."
That night they both slept badly. The wind was picking up, the storm passing over the mouth of the Mississippi and veering eastward, back into the open Gulf, heading now for the Redneck Riviera with its white sand beaches, endless bungalows, and garish motel-and-casino strips. Jim understood that the storm's counterclockwise winds must also be pushing the Gulf into Lake Pontchartrain, the lake into the city; the thought kept him restless, and his unease made sleep difficult for her.
Toward dawn he fell asleep at last, only to wake suddenly to the incessant rattling of window sashes. Greenish daylight filtered through the drapes, and so did the wind, setting all Gwen's furbelows into tremulous motion. He dressed, hastened downstairs, and found her in the kitchen, sitting at the battered table where they ate, left hand pressed to her mouth, gazing at the TV screen. When Jim touched her, she took his hand without turning to look at him.
"Where's that?” he asked, staring at a widening breach in a concrete floodwall, with coffee-colored water pouring through.
But he didn't hear or need to hear her answer. The wall guarded the Seventeenth Street Canal, less than six blocks from Lark Street. Lakeside was doomed.
He muttered, “The future ain't long at all."
* * * *
That afternoon they took a siesta together, lying side by side in their underwear on Gwen's bed.
They held each other and Gwen cried for friends she'd known, for houses where she'd partied, for the deleted portion of her youth and memories. Jim wanted to cry, but couldn't. Grief stifled him. What do you do when your life is nothing but the past, and the past is suddenly swept away?
Bonaparte had a wild night of howling wind, tossing boughs, and crashing trees. It was only the western edge of the storm, but the power went off, the air conditioning died, and Jim and Gwen retreated to the front gallery, where they sat in the tumultuous darkness, holding hands. She said more than once, “Jim, I'm so sorry,” but he only grunted.
Next day the power came back on and they viewed the scope of the catastrophe in New Orleans. Television showed three-fourths of the city submerged in water, with islands of fire. Where was the President, where was the army, where was everybody? Days slipped by like a road without mileposts as the world gazed at hunger, filth, and thirst in the Superdome, exhausted people sweltering on blinding-white freeway bridges that rose out of newborn lakes and marshes, bodies floating and swelling at familiar intersections gone unrecognizable. Looters stumbled through knee-deep water, toting stolen TVs in a city without power. On quiet Uptown streets, oaks gracefully mirrored themselves in canals where no canals were supposed to be.
And Jim was so far away, so comfortable, so safe. He felt bubble-wrapped.
Bonapartians gave fund-raisers for evacuees who'd run out of money; churches prayed for the dead and
gathered food and clothing for the living. People Jim had never met stopped him on the street to ask how things were going “down there"—as if he knew! Olivia hugged him and cried against his shirt and refused to take any money for the extra trouble he was giving her. He held her and for the first time cried too, not for anything he'd lost, but for the utterly unexpected kindness of strangers.
The town was full of refugees now, and they had little to do but gossip. They checked maps posted on Google and divided into castes based on how deep their houses had flooded. Jim gained some cachet at a charity jazz brunch when an Uptowner remarked that his house was high and dry on the natural levee of the Mississippi. Jim said, “Mine was on the natural levee of the Seventeenth Street Canal,” and the Uptowner retired from the field, badly worsted. Yet the Davy Jones Award didn't go to Jim. During a break when the musicians were lunching, the pianist commented en passant that his concert grand at home was under twelve feet of water. Somewhat staggered by this—what were they talking, a fifty-thousand-dollar instrument?—Jim heard himself rather stupidly saying he didn't suppose it would be worth much now. The musician replied, “Well, not as a piano,” returned to his bench, and launched into a riff, triumphant in this curious sweepstake where you won by losing.
Those stories were nonfiction. There was also plenty of fiction to be heard. Tommy Leboeuf came up with new and more colorful tales at every gathering. At the jazz brunch he became the center of attention by revealing that he'd earned a week's leave to get married by first serving at the Superdome during the worst of times. While he was there, a predator took advantage of the darkness and disorder to rape two children, and when Tommy and his partner caught him, they threw him to the mob and watched them tear him limb from limb.
"Me, I'da liked to jern in, ‘cept I was on duty,” he said, and all the polite folks in their ice-cream suits and summer dresses nodded agreement. Jim and Gwen, knowing perfectly well that Tommy and Lydia had fled the city before the storm hit, wigwagged to each other with raised eyebrows, but said nothing.
Still, Gwen had had enough of her Cadillac-driving charity cases with their tall tales, and she told them they'd have to leave. They departed while she and Jim were out to dinner, taking with them a harvest of knickknacks from the house. A couple of days later, Jim saw the cop and his lady friend on TV. They'd been arrested in St. Louis on a warrant for a stolen Cadillac. Lydia was a hooker ("exotic entertainer,” said the reporter), though from Biloxi and not Texarkana. Their stories had one real element: Tommy Leboeuf was a cop, and soon faced charges of desertion as well as grand theft, auto.
Gwen said, “Well, how about that lying, thieving sonofabitch!” But Jim said that a crooked cop made him homesick.
* * * *
That joke was typical of his dry humor. But an undercurrent of horror ran beneath his thoughts of home. Stories about attics formed a staple of TV news, and every time he saw one he thought of what might be waiting for him at 488 Lark Street. He couldn't shake the image of dead people sprawled out and rotting in the recreation room he and Dot had worked so hard to build out of the dusty emptiness.
Who could have taken refuge there, and when and why? Alas, there was an obvious answer. Most of his neighbors lived in one-story ranch-styles built on slabs. His attic might have been the highest spot around when the floodwall collapsed and a tsunami poured into Lakeside. Several neighbors kept keys to his house for emergencies, as he kept keys to theirs, so getting in wouldn't have been a problem for old Dr. Dreyfus, the Campbells, Carol and Jean, and their little dogs, Bunch and Bundle.
Was that what had happened? He had no way to find out; the land lines were down and when he tried to call into area code 504 on Gwen's cell phone, he roused only monotonous robot voices saying the towers were down, everything was out of service.
In front of the TV, he stared hypnotized at stories about desperate people trying to break out of attic prisons, images of rescuers from airboats and helicopters breaking in. Here, the searchers found only a guttered candle, a half-empty Fritos bag, a plastic water bottle. There, the remains of an old man who'd holed up and drowned clawing at a roof he couldn't break through. A black kid pointed to what had been his house and told a CBS reporter, “Mama's up there, and she's stuck to the floor."
By now Jim had forgotten what sound sleep meant. He woke and dozed and woke again. He wanted to go home and, at the same time, wanted never to go home. Life went on all around him, yet increasingly apart. Gwen had wasted enough time away from her business, and spent the days at her phones and her PC, lining up customers for new textbooks and multimedia gadgetry. Meanwhile he idled around Bonaparte, an accidental tourist, viewing such depressing sights as the overgrown and cricket-haunted Confederate cemetery, and the Catholic basilica whose many spires made him think of a crown of thorns.
He ate often with strangers, devouring information about New Orleans with greater appetite than the bland, heavy food. Refugees swapped stories as they consumed burgers at Cow-Cow Boogie or munched huge, tasteless crab salads at the Plantation Kitchen. All of them except Jim carried arsenals of gadgetry that beeped and vibrated and played the opening bars of “My Blue Heaven,” and by one means or another they all seemed to have reached hundreds of contacts who were ready and willing to give eye-witness accounts of the city.
So he learned that Uptown now was dry and the power back on. Bourbon Street was flourishing again, all sleaze, noise, and neon. The casinos were rushing repairs, seeing gold in a new flood, this time of construction workers pouring into town to stuff the pockets of their jeans with FEMA money. Whores were, as ever, fully employed.
Elsewhere the news was not so good. Plaquemines Parish was mostly under the Gulf, patrolled by pompano, redfish, and mackerel instead of the Isleño fishermen whose ancestors had come from the Canaries centuries ago to catch them. Poor-white St. Bernard Parish had hardly a house standing. Lakeside? Still forbidden country, daytimes roasting in the merciless sun, nighttimes dark under a sliver of new moon.
One day five weeks after the storm he told Gwen, “I've got to go back and see what's left of my house. If anything."
She nodded. She'd been expecting the news, had been Googling the situation too, and had already reached her own conclusions. She'd changed her locks after the Leboeufs departed, and now gave him a set of the new keys.
"You won't find much down there,” she warned. “I'm flying to Albuquerque. Those people need bilingual textbooks whether they know it or not. When you come back, just let yourself in. You know where everything is. The stuff you salvage from Lakeside—let me see.... Put it in the garage. We can park our cars outside for a while."
All this was brusque and businesslike, and it didn't go down at all well. Where did she get off, taking charge of his future? After all, his life had been destroyed, not hers. All he could feel now was the sense of loss, a palpable absence like an amputee's phantom limb. What to do about it he didn't yet know. Until he faced the bodies of his neighbors lying amid the wreckage of his home, he couldn't decide ... decide ... decide what?
Maybe whether to bother living on. His father had faced that question once, and decided not to.
When he was packed and ready to go, Gwen surprised him by embracing him passionately, then holding his head in both hands and crying against his cheek. He whispered, “I'll be back, I'll see you soon,” over and over. Then he drove away, wondering if either of them really believed it.
* * * *
Traffic on I-55 south was heavy but moving well, a river of homebound license plates. I-10 east was frantic, the center lanes filled with swaying empty FEMA trailers under tow, racing to dates with the homeless. Trucks and cars filled the other lanes like rush hour on a California freeway, a traffic jam moving at 75 mph, everybody driving with the pedal to the metal, frantic for their first sight of bad news.
When the city rose out of the marshes, Jim didn't see much destruction at first, just blue plastic tarps covering damaged roofs. Expecting police roadblocks in Lakeside, h
e turned into the Uptown. Here, instead of hysteria, an eerie quiet prevailed—the traffic sporadic, the streets clear, Chinese walls of debris piled along the curbs, huge yellow trucks and handling machines with bigger teeth than the denizens of Jurassic Park hunkering between the oaks on the wide grassy median of St. Charles Avenue. He smelled for the first time the dry stink of the city, the decay of sheetrock and insulation, carpets and wood soaked with the foul residue of departed floodwater.
Yet some people were home and starting to clean up. Duct-taped refrigerators lined the streets like fat tombstones, many with spray-painted epitaphs, some political (Cheney Inside—Do Not Open), some gastronomical (Free Lunch—Maggots Only), some vaguely erotic (Mr. Trashman! Take me, I'm yours!). On doors and housefronts he saw spray-painted signs, many enigmatic like X/OB, but others perfectly clear, like U LOOT—I SHOOT. A hand-painted sign on a barricaded shop that sold Persian rugs warned:
I AM INSIDE SLEEPING
WITH A BIG DOG
AN UGLY WOMAN
TWO SHOTGUNS
AND A CLAW HAMMER
That made him smile; his congested spirit lightened. Suddenly he felt hungry, and began to search for food. Outside Magnum's, a four-star restaurant whose roof had mostly blown off, he found chefs in tall white hats making hamburgers on open grills, adding to each a dollop of bleu cheese and a squirt of some sauce from a secret recipe. Jim stopped to eat a burger—Finally some food with an attitude!—drink an icy Coke that tasted better than Mumm's, and troll for information.
Some customers had brought folding chairs, à la Mardi Gras. Others lolled on green grass that had never tasted floodwater, or huddled under battered oaks and date palms in scant spots of shade. Like all New Orleans crowds, they were noisy as a cage of toucans; gossip had always been a popular local sport, and everybody talked to everybody, for everybody had a story to tell.
FSF, October 2007 Page 11
