Hurricane Song

by Paul Volponi

The reporters found a man crying, holding a young boy in his arms. First they found out what his story was. Then they put him in front of the cameras to tell it on TV.

  “The water came rising up so strong you couldn’t stand,” the man said, sobbing. “I got onto the porch roof with my son and was tryin’ to pull my wife up, too. ‘You can’t hold me!’ she was screaming. ‘You can’t hold me!’ Then the current ripped her away. I don’t know where she is. She’s all I had in this world. Her and my boy.”

  Right away, I started thinking about Mom, and how it didn’t take anything near that big to pull us apart. But at least I knew where she was—safe in Chicago.

  That boy was staring straight down at the sidewalk the whole time, pretending not to hear. The reporter announced the woman’s name and said if anyone had information about her to please call in. But when that TV crew walked away, I couldn’t figure out if they’d done anybody any good, or just used that family’s pain to keep people watching their channel.

  Maybe fifty feet from us, a soldier tipped back his canteen and took a long drink in front of everybody. That’s when a woman reached over the barrier and snatched the canteen right out of his hand.

  “This isn’t a prison camp!” the woman shouted at him, before she drank out of it.

  People were laughing and hooting hard at him.

  "Yes, ma’am!” hollered Fess. "I hear you!”

  That soldier tried to suck it up, but he couldn’t, and snapped all at once. He was about to jump the barrier to get his canteen back when a bunch of other soldiers, with their heads screwed on tighter, stopped him. Then Scobie got ahold of him and walked him off to a different section to stand guard.

  When that woman was done drinking, she passed the canteen over to somebody else. Even after it was empty, people were holding it up high, waving that canteen like a trophy they’d won. Everybody was cheering for whoever held it. Then after the fuss died down and the canteen disappeared into the crowd, somebody chucked it overhand into a crowd of soldiers, crowning one in the head.

  Fess pointed up to the sky and shouted, “He did it!”

  Uncle Roy laughed like anything over it, but Pop wouldn’t crack a smile.

  “Command and control!” Captain Hancock screamed at his soldiers. “Command and control!”

  I’d played football for coaches who yelled the same kind of shit. But once you were square in the middle of a real scrap, words like that didn’t mean a thing. They were just more noise in the background.

  Pop opened his gig book and started calling off the names of clubs he’d played and people he’d jammed with. Uncle Roy and Fess had something to say about almost every one, like they were watching home movies.

  “Here’s a gig we did with Fess close to thirty years ago,” said Pop, showing my uncle the page. “Look how he signed his name for me—Mr. Lonnie Easterly.”

  “You stuck-up bastard.” Uncle Roy grinned at Fess. “Is that what we had to call you by back then?”

  “I probably said to myself, ‘Look at these two genius boys. They can’t remember who they’re playing with ’less somebody writes it down for ’em,’” Fess crowed.

  Pop pulled a pen from his shirt pocket. He turned the gig book to the first blank page, and at the top wrote, August 29, 2005—Superdome—Funeral March for Cyrus Campbell.

  “I’ll be a little less formal this time,” said Fess, signing his nickname.

  Uncle Roy signed it, too. Then I watched Pop write out his own name, and study all three signatures sitting together.

  “That might be the last gig that gets into this book for a long time,” said Pop. “But it’s the first with Miles on board.”

  So I grabbed for the book like it was a joke. Only Pop let it go, without fighting me. I couldn’t believe how my hands were trembling once I had it. I held it steady and signed my name neat, so nobody would ever mistake it.

  I signed—Miles “Chic” Shaw—drum.

  “There, now I’m official—a musician bum like the rest of you,” I jabbed at them.

  But when I picked the pen up off the paper and gave the book back to Pop for him to see, something inside me started to breathe a little easier.

  10

  And when my hunger is all I have

  When my hunger is all I have

  Lord, how I want to be in that number

  When the saints go marching in

  Tuesday August 30, 2:30 P.M.

  The hotter it got, the harder it was for people to hold on to their tempers. Everyone was angry at being stranded outside the Superdome, having to look up at that mother all day.

  A white man got beat down by a crowd of people, and the soldiers had to step in and save his ass. They pulled him from the bottom of the pile all scraped up and bleeding, wearing nothing but a pair of blue denim shorts with the back pocket pulled inside out. Later, I heard it started because he asked to bum a cigarette off somebody. But everybody knew that him being white was a big part of it, too.

  “I told you how it was gonna be,” Pop said to me. “This is shelter life super-sized and pushed to the limit. Now they got us out here in the blazin’ sun to boil up our blood. It’s a wonder we don’t all kill each other.”

  Helicopters buzzed over our heads like dragonflies, and their rotors sliced the hot air with a thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump .

  Lots of those copters landed on the other side of the Superdome. Some of them were bringing in people who’d been rescued from the flood, but others looked like they were hauling supplies. Everybody said it was food and water they were delivering, and people stood up on their tiptoes to see. But an hour later, we were still sucking our own spit, and our stomachs stayed empty.

  A dude with a TV camera strapped to his shoulder was walking along the barrier, filming us. Some people stared straight into the camera and shouted things like “Save us, Jesus!” or “They sent us out here to die!” Others stuck up their middle finger or dropped their heads down in shame.

  When that camera focused on me, I tensed up inside and felt like the whole world could see me stripped naked. I was about to turn around and look the other way when I figured Mom might see me and feel better to know for sure I was safe. So I looked into the cold black lens and saw the reflection of everybody around me—squeezed down small and stretched wide. I tried to keep my face blank and not show any expression at all. But I couldn’t tell if I did.

  After the camera passed, I turned to Pop. I could see the worry in his eyes that nobody watching TV would ever pick up on. I felt it, too. And right then, I would have traded a cheeseburger deluxe with fries and a two-liter Pepsi to see if our apartment and Pharaohs were still standing.

  That’s when a man jumped in front of the camera and shouted, “I don’t treat my dog like this! Is this the Third World, or is this America? We need help!”

  Then he turned to everybody behind him, and yelled, “Let ’em hear you everywhere—We need help! We need help!”

  At first, just a handful of people screamed it with him. Then out of nowhere, something big kicked in. People started pounding their feet and clapping their hands to those words. All of a sudden, a good rhythm got going. More and more mouths opened. Pop, Uncle Roy, and Fess were chanting it, too. I went into our stuff and grabbed my drum. I pounded out that rhythm harder and harder, till it sounded like thunder in my ears. Then almost everybody stuck outside the Superdome started shouting those words.

  "We need help! We need help! We need help!”

  Hancock used his bullhorn, but nobody could hear a word of what he had to say. He was blocked out by our voices, and the captain’s bars on his arm didn’t count for crap.

  Those voices wouldn’t die down or quit, either. It didn’t even matter about the TV camera anymore. I guess it was something that built up inside people so strong it needed to let loose. And for maybe ten minutes solid, the air was being rocked by that chant.

  The stink from that sewer water in the streets got so bad it was like breathing into someb
ody’s armpit. People all around us were pissing and shitting everywhere, and the concourse got turned into a giant toilet.

  “The stench of death’s mixed in there, too,” said Uncle Roy, pointing to that old lady in the wheelchair I’d seen inside.

  She was sitting on the other side of the barriers where the doctors were. Her face, and the rest of the top half of her, was covered up beneath a plaid blanket. I guess she never opened her eyes again, or maybe she did and couldn’t stand what she saw. There wasn’t going to be a march or music for her passing. Maybe no one here even knew her name. But I prayed her soul was sailing over that river in Africa with Cyrus’s.

  “Corpses are rottin’ all over this city, I guarantee,” Fess said. “There’s probably even some in this jamboree here who look like they’re sleepin’.”

  “So we shouldn’t let you nap too long,” cracked Pop.

  “That’s right. I want to wake up to your horn, Doc. Not the angel Gabriel’s,” said Fess, without a smile.

  It was just past four o’clock when the first signs came that we were going to be fed. The soldiers set up stations, and people turned frantic, trying to get into line. Then Captain Hancock got back on his bullhorn, and for the first time people shushed each other down to hear him.

  “We have secured water and emergency rations to sustain you,” Hancock announced, stiff. “Remain orderly! I repeat, remain orderly!”

  Even after standing in the hot sun all day and breathing in the same stink as we did, Hancock never dropped that army act for a second. I wondered if he was some kind of robot running on batteries, as I glared into the whites of his eyes. Then I thought about what his kids would be like after growing up in a house with him, and I quit right there.

  Pop wasn’t in the mood to fight for space on any line. So me and him got a spot more than halfway back from the middle, with Uncle Roy and Fess staying behind to guard our stuff.

  Then Pop turned to me with a speech that had nothing to do with being hungry.

  “Miles, I know I ain’t been the best father there ever was. But I want you to know that I love you,” he said. “Sometimes a man chooses a road and he can’t turn back. He gets tied up to certain things and won’t let go. So no matter what comes in the short term—if we get separated ’cause of anything that comes out of this storm—I want you to know I’m not cutting out on you.”

  “Why would we get separated, Pop?” I asked.

  “I got to jump that barrier, Miles,” he answered, serious as a heart attack. “I can’t rest no other way—not till I see what’s happened to my life. I spent it makin’ music here. I can’t get on no bus and just ride away for someplace else.”

  “That’s nothing new, Pop,” I said sharp. “You been ditching me for your music since before I could remember. So what’s changed any? I got a drum I hit a few times now?”

  “It’s not like that, Miles,” Pop said. “What I’m talking about’s bigger than us.”

  “You go ahead. I won’t hold it against you,” I sparked, all fired up and sarcastic. “You know where it is you belong. I’m just finding out what that feels like. Only I ain’t sure yet. Not like you, Pop.”

  He backed up a step and told me, “I can’t fault you for what you said. But I can’t fix it now neither.”

  Pop waved Uncle Roy over to take his place in line. Then he gave him his gig book to hold, and Pop pushed his jaw towards the barrier for my uncle to see.

  But Roy didn’t look too surprised or try to argue with him. Instead, he gave his lighter to Pop, who put it in his shirt pocket.

  “I’ll watch after Miles for ya, Doc,” Roy said. “But don’t do nothin’ too foolish. It’s bound to be brutal out there.”

  Pop walked over to where our stuff was. I watched him slap Fess’s back and dig through the duffel bag for his horn. Then he stood by the barrier, eyeing the soldiers who were mostly getting people fed. Captain Hancock was busy barking out orders, but Sergeant Scobie was only twenty feet from Pop, looking over the whole scene. The three of them stayed that way for a few minutes, till I couldn’t take it anymore. So I walked off the line and headed straight for Scobie, with my uncle calling after me low, “Miles, stay put.”

  “Sergeant Scobie,” I said, like I had a question that couldn’t wait.

  He turned to fix his eyes on me, and when Scobie took the first step in my direction, Pop jumped the barrier and bolted.

  Soldiers started blowing their whistles, and Hancock came charging over.

  “Halt! Halt!” Hancock screamed after Pop at the top of his lungs.

  Then Hancock grabbed for his gun, but Scobie bumped into him hard, probably on purpose. And Hancock lost his balance, falling down in a heap as his gun went flying.

  That’s when I jetted, too. I hopped the fence and flew past a soldier who only put a hand up to stop me. It took the first ten yards to shake the rubber from my legs, but after that I was really moving. I peeked back over my shoulder, but none of the soldiers wanted to chase us down in that melting heat, and they were just jogging after us.

  I was closing in on Pop quick, but I couldn’t catch my breath to call out his name, and he probably figured I was some soldier hot on his tail. He hit the end of the concourse ramp and was running toward the water in the street. Then I heard his feet start to splash through it. I geared down to look at it good and didn’t know how deep that water was going to get. But when I reached the edge, I didn’t hesitate and screamed, “Pop, it’s me! Wait, Pop!”

  11

  Some say this world of trouble

  Is the only one we need

  But I’m waiting for that day

  When the new world is revealed

  Tuesday August 30, 4:36 P.M.

  Pop didn’t try to talk me into going back. He just looked at me like maybe I really did belong next to him. And the two of us pushed through that water together as Pop clutched the horn in its case against his chest.

  “It can’t be this deep all over,” he said, with the water up to this waist. “That ain’t possible.”

  “I don’t know, Pop. I never been in a flood before,” I answered, breathing hard.

  Garbage, tree branches, roof shingles, and logs of what looked like human shit moved across the top of the water. It was cold as anything at the bottom, and my toes were turning numb. A photo album got caught up inside a little current, and was spinning in circles before I grabbed it to see. That water had slid a dozen pictures together, and stained some kid’s first birthday party brown. I didn’t want to see another page, so I chucked it behind me and kept on moving.

  We hadn’t gone far when we hit a dead body floating facedown.

  “Don’t get near it, Miles. He’s probably got disease on him by now,” Pop said, shoving water away with one arm.

  The man had on a bright yellow shirt with a pattern of big red flowers, and shorts to match. He was dressed like he could have been walking on a beach in the Bahamas. But he wasn’t. He was lying dead in a flood in New Orleans under a black rainbow of smoke.

  After five or six blocks, the water level had dropped a few inches. The water was pitch black, and my body just disappeared into it. We were wading through it as fast as we could, and if the muscles in my thighs weren’t burning from the strain, I would have believed the bottom half of me was gone.

  Helicopters were buzzing everywhere. People were up on their roofs or hanging out of shattered windows. They were waving shirts and towels tied to broom-sticks, trying to signal those copters to be rescued.

  “I wanna get out of the line of sight from that damn Superdome,” Pop said, pointing to a side street with a red stop sign on the corner turned upside down. “The bigger streets are gonna get more attention. Nobody’s draggin’ me back.”

  There was a dog stuck up in a tree. He was balancing on a branch on all fours, barking wild like the end of the world was here.

  Two grown men were pushing an air mattress towards us, with an older woman stretched out on top. She was tied to it across
her waist by a bed sheet, and was almost unconscious. They said she was their mother—that she was a diabetic and they had to get her to the Superdome for insulin quick.

  “They got doctors and nurses there,” I said. “But it’s crazy, too.”

  “We can’t worry ’bout that,” one of them said. “Police told us a three-foot shark got loose from the aquarium and is swimming somewhere in these streets. If that didn’t stop us, nothing could.”

  Then Pop asked, “How is it behind you?”

  “It ain’t nothin’ but hell back there,” the other one answered, before they started moving again.

  The water level was down to our waists, and the sun was so steaming hot, I thought maybe that flood was just evaporating.

  A few blocks later, a boat showed up at an intersection. The man inside stood up to see us. He was wearing sunglasses and some kind of uniform, leaning on a long pole he used to steer. He waved us over, but we wouldn’t go anywhere near him.

  “Don’t pay him any mind,” Pop said. “Just keep on goin’.”

  I looked back one time and he was staring at us, shaking his head like he knew better than we did.

  We climbed some concrete steps and walked out of that stinking shit-filled river onto solid ground. A family was camped out on a corner, cooking over a fire on the ground. I could smell the chicken frying, and my stomach started turning cartwheels. The father had a huge machete knife hanging from the front of his belt, and there were gunshots sounding from a few blocks over, by a row of stores.

  He looked us up and down as we dripped a puddle on the sidewalk. Then he patted the handle on his knife and said, “You’d better be strapped with more than a horn if you’re goin’ into that mess up ahead.”

  Pop looked me square in the eye, like we were standing at those crossroads he told me about. I couldn’t see any devil yet, promising me an easy ride. But I’d already heard Cain’s empty screams. So I wasn’t about to trade away my soul for anything.

  “I’ve always made my own way, Miles,” Pop said, like a warning. “I’m not used to worryin’ over somebody else.”