City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  They had shared half a house in Mid-City themselves for a year before Craig went back to Ann Arbor to finish grad school; later, Bobby’s house became the place where Craig and Alice would stay on trips down. Bobby pieced together a living writing about music for small local publications, Wavelength and OffBeat and Cultural Vistas. Craig always told his friend that he should try and expand to write for national magazines, but Bobby didn’t seem particularly interested; he was a creature of New Orleans, bred and born. There had been a moment after they had known each other for a couple of years when Craig raised the question one too many times, and Bobby’s reaction let him know that he shouldn’t bring it up again. Behind the exchange lurked the fact that Bobby was a native New Orleanian and Craig, no matter how much he loved the city, was not. He let it drop and never picked it up again.

  They went with Jen and Alice to Oktoberfest at Deutsches Haus on Galvez Street and ate knockwurst and sauerkraut and laughed for hours, danced the chicken dance to the oom-pah band. Alice and Jen, slightly cool to one another at first, discovered that they shared a guilty taste for Neil Diamond, and one night Craig and Bobby listened in horror as their partners sang the entire lyric to “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” outside the Maple Leaf. They danced to Snooks Eaglin or the Radiators at Tipitina’s, went to second lines on Sundays in Central City. Alice had always loved it, and Craig knew he would marry her and have children with her. She was, he thought, like him; they both came from outside the culture but knew how precious it was, and how rare, what an opportunity it offered to enjoy life. They would find themselves simultaneously turning to look at each other in the middle of a meal, or listening to music, as if they had read each others’ minds; they would lock eyes and then as if by mutual agreement continue on with what they were doing. It was on one of those delicious and heartbreaking nights, when things seemed to be at the peak of what they could be (and the sweetness was sharpened with the tenderest melancholy, always somehow present, that this moment would not last forever), that Annie was conceived.

  Now, years later, at his son’s third birthday party, on yet another sweet, humid night (he could almost believe, after all these years, that they would never end), Craig took a deep breath and looked around. Through the groups of people he saw Annie across the yard, dancing—jumping up and down in place, really—with her friend Natasha from Boucher. What a beautiful evening, he thought. Even after nine years living in the city, he could still be stopped in his tracks by the smell of a sweet olive tree. It weighed on his heart that Alice wanted to move. She would try and act as if all it took was talking about it, but he knew she was tired of it. How could he trade this warmth and happiness for some yuppie party, he thought, in God knew where. Minneapolis. Which was a great city, with lots of smart, literate folks…But so earnest, in their Polartec fleeces…He had tried to describe it to friends up in the Midwest; some of them got it, some of them didn’t. The magnolia trees and the oak trees under the heavy liquid air, the smell of crawfish boil floating toward him and the flowering trees, surrounded by other people who also got it, loved it…

  His eye came to rest on Bobby, who gave him a seraphic smile and said, “Bummer, huh?”

  “You know, I still can’t fucking believe it sometimes.”

  They stood there in silent appreciation for a few moments, in the dimming light of the waning summer evening. Inside occasional group hollers, like bursts of confetti from a cannon—the guys watching the Saints…

  Craig and Bobby both noticed Arthur Borofsky looking their way. Borofsky was a character out of a comic opera—portly, flam-boyantly mustachioed, given to baroque, grandiloquent speech. He was younger than he looked, a strange parvenu in a Panama hat. Even after six years of working for him, Craig felt uneasy around Borofsky. He regarded Craig as a fellow sophisticated outsider in a province full of charming eccentrics, and it made Craig intensely uncomfortable. Craig felt toward him, on bad days, as a character in some gothic tale might feel toward his doppelgänger, some bird of ill-omen with an attitude of disturbing familiarity…Borofsky was standing with a man in his mid-thirties, about five-seven, with neatly cropped hair, wearing a yellow Lacoste shirt and pressed khaki shorts, brand-new Top-Siders and no socks, sunglasses hanging from around his neck on a pair of Croakies.

  “Who’s that with Emil Jannings?” Craig said.

  “Never saw him,” Bobby said. “Looks sort of like you did when you got to town.”

  Craig took a step back from his friend, frowning and laughing with wounded pride. “Ouch,” he said.

  “Check the shoes,” Bobby said. “Uh-oh.”

  Borofsky was walking the fellow in their direction. From about ten feet away he held out his hand grandly and said, “I believe you should meet these two gentlemen. This is your host and the editor of the award-winning lifestyle magazine Gumbo, Craig Donaldson.”

  “Chuck Bridges,” the stranger said, looking Craig directly in the eye and putting his hand out to shake. He repeated “Chuck Bridges” to Bobby, and said, “I didn’t catch your name…?”

  “Bobby Tervalon.”

  Borofsky said, “He’s too modest to say it, but he means he is THE Bobby Tervalon, music critic extraordinaire. A gentleman and a scholar.” The presentation of clichés in full regalia was a specialty of Borofsky’s.

  “Hey, what about me?” Craig said, joking with the boss.

  “I have already enumerated your many sterling qualities to Chuck. Chuck is here doing some very important and even, I might say, visionary real estate development work. You all will profit from knowing one another.” Borofsky held out his hands as if giving a blessing to them, then drifted off.

  After a moment, Bobby pointed to the newcomer’s feet and said, “Are those Docksiders?”

  Slightly confused for a moment, the man named Chuck followed the line of Bobby’s finger down to his feet. They both saw him register what Bobby meant, then the man looked up at Bobby and said, “Top-Siders.”

  They carried on some labored small talk. Chuck was from Houston, but he was staying in Metairie for now, fixing up a few properties in the area, getting ready to flip them. Craig listened with a clenched annoyance; another outsider who didn’t really get the place, coming in to figure out a way to exploit it, instead of honoring and enjoying it. The real estate market had been booming in the past two years—good news for Craig and Alice, of course, but also a sign of increased interest from wealthy people who wanted investments or second homes in town. Chuck said he was, in fact, getting ready to “flip” a property on nearby Lowerline Street…He pulled out a business card case and handed them each a card. “You guys live in this area?”

  “This is my house,” Craig said.

  “Great block,” Chuck Bridges said, expressionlessly. “You’re a block from Boucher School. Thinking of selling?”

  The question was so abrupt and tactless that Craig couldn’t tell immediately whether it was a joke, which it was not. “A lot of people are looking to sell right now,” Chuck Bridges went on. “It’s a good time to do it. Properties right in this area have gone up about fifty percent in the last three years. I think they’re still undervalued. We’ve flipped four in the past five months.”

  “Well,” Craig said, “we don’t think of it as a ‘property’; we think of it as a home, and my wife and I and our children are happy here.”

  Unoffended by the tone of Craig’s response, and with the same healthy and vacant expression on his face, the man said, “Keep my card and call if I can ever be of any help. Are you in the area?” he asked Bobby.

  “Me? No; my wife and I live in the old Blue Plate Mayonnaise condos.” Craig looked at his friend; there was no such place.

  Chuck Bridges looked into the distance, riffling through a mental card file and coming up empty. “They haven’t developed that yet,” he said, frowning ever so slightly.

  “The one in St. Gabriel,” Bobby said, helpfully.

  This was the location of a women’s prison. Bobby was
laying it on thick for the guy.

  “Oh,” Chuck Bridges said. “Didn’t know about that one.” Turning to Craig, he said, “Nice meeting you. Let me know if you’re thinking about selling.”

  “Sure thing,” Craig said as the guy walked away. When he seemed safely out of earshot, Craig said, “Who the fuck invited him?”

  “He seems to have taken quite a shine to you.”

  “I’m serious. I want to know if this is going to be some kind of infestation. It’s like finding the first ant in your kitchen. Now I can’t have a crawfish boil without getting hit on by real estate speculators? My fucking ‘property…’ Is that how they talk in Houston?”

  “Hey,” Bobby said. “Houston’s all right. Arnett Cobb’s from Houston.”

  “The Blue Plate Mayonnaise condos in St. Gabriel…” Craig said.

  “They’re extremely undervalued,” Bobby said. He squared himself and looked at his friend. “Got under your skin, huh? Everything okay?”

  Craig let out a big sigh, looked around the yard. “I had a pretty upsetting talk with Alice today.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “Not especially. Same old thing.”

  There was a general movement toward the driveway, and Doug walked past them, toward the kitchen, saying “Bugs are up” as he passed. Then he stopped himself, took a step backward and whispered something in Bobby’s ear, walked off again. At Craig’s raised eyebrow, Bobby said, “Another beer.”

  “Annie,” Craig called to his daughter, “Let’s go eat some crawfish.”

  In the driveway the high wooden table, with its several layers of newspaper, now supported a giant mound of steaming, dark orange crawfish. Nine guests were already gathered around, squeezing the highly seasoned meat out of the tails, sucking the juice out of the rest of the carcass and then going immediately for another, washing them down with beer and also eating the potatoes and corn on the cob that had been boiled along with the crawfish. It was one of the most ingrained communal rituals in New Orleans, everyone eating from the same horn of plenty, facing one another and talking, talking, talking as they ate, about music they had seen, city politics, the Saints game, which was still going inside, making jokes, making plans, making good-natured trouble. People came and went from the table, but the table was always encircled by people.

  Craig went inside to get a stool for Annie, who was holding their spot. When he brought it she got up and started in; at seven, she was an old hand at the process. Craig stood behind her, reaching around her to grab the reddish prizes, once in a while grabbing one that Annie had claimed as her own, enjoying her protests. He loved that Annie took such pleasure in this ritual, threw herself into it so completely. Alice came over, too.

  “Where’s Malcolm?” he asked.

  “He’s inside playing with Franz and Sherri.”

  “How great is this?” Craig said to his wife.

  Her mouth full, she gave her husband the thumbs-up.

  “Daddy,” Annie said, “why do they call them mudbugs if they don’t have any wings?”

  “What kind of question is that?” Craig said, teasing. “Ants don’t have wings, and they’re bugs.”

  “I’m serious,” she said, in a whining voice.

  “I am, too,” he said. “I’ll bet you more bugs crawl than fly.”

  “What about flies?”

  “What about spiders?”

  The others at the table began to chime in. “Centipedes.”

  “Cicadas.”

  “Locusts.”

  One guy, a dishwasher up at Jacques-Imo’s restaurant and a friend of Doug’s, volunteered “nutria,” a rodentlike animal native to Louisiana, and was jeered down by everyone.

  “What about beetles?”

  “What about caterpillars?” Craig said.

  “Caterpillars turn into butterflies!” Annie said triumphantly. She started giggling.

  “Alice,” Craig said, “can you help us here? Annie and I are having a disagreement over whether more bugs crawl or fly.”

  From the other side of the table, Alice, who had been listening, said, “What about gnats?”

  “What are gnats?” Annie said.

  “They’re little tiny bugs you can hardly see,” Craig said. “You see them more up north than in New Orleans.”

  “There are plenty of gnats in New Orleans,” Alice said. “Fleas, too.”

  This was a reference to a problem they had had with their late indoor-outdoor cat Mr. Bill. Alice had wanted him to be an indoor cat because it was so easy to pick up fleas in the hot weather. Craig argued that the cat needed to be outdoors to let off steam. He prevailed, but the fleas Mr. Bill occasionally brought in would inevitably be the topic of some small barb from Alice, along the lines of (with a false breeziness), “Oh, look at that. Another flea.” Craig took a swig of beer to wash away the unpleasant association.

  “A cockroach!” Annie said.

  “Cockroaches spend more time crawling than flying,” Craig said.

  “No, Daddy—there’s a cockroach!”

  It was crawling up one of the table legs, unusual because the two-or three-inch-long insect pariahs tended to avoid groups of people. Craig reached over and flicked it off with his finger and it flew a few feet to the side of the house next door.

  “Yay!” Annie said. “It flew!” She laughed and pointed at Craig, and Alice joined in the laughter; it was, undeniably, a point for the other side, and Craig said, “All right, you win. For now. Later I’m going on the Internet and get a list of all the crawling bugs.”

  “Flying bugs!” Annie said.

  Around 9:30 or so the party, full of children as it was, began to fray and unravel; people began drifting home, and Craig began to get a jump on bagging up some trash. At one point he found Alice outside in the backyard; he walked up to her and tried to kiss her but she drew up her shoulders and said, “Not here.”

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “I’m just not comfortable with that, around people.”

  “Come on!” Craig said. “It’s a crawfish boil…”

  “Can you just give me a little space for a minute,” she said, looking up at him. For a moment Craig wasn’t sure whether she was going to cry. He walked off, with his warm mood bruised.

  Carrying some plates back into the kitchen, he ran into Chuck Bridges, the real estate guy, who was eating a sandwich. “Didn’t get enough bugs, Chuck?”

  Chuck looked at him a little vacantly. “Bugs?”

  “Crawfish.”

  “Oh,” he said, good-naturedly, and waved his free hand. “Too much trouble for too little meat. I’ll take a ham sandwich any day.”

  Eventually, the rest of the guests left; Doug took the crawfish rig back to his house and Craig and Alice cleaned up the yard and the kitchen. On the late news the storm was a big item, along with the Saints’ 21–6 loss to Baltimore. They discussed what they should do about the hurricane. It was a huge storm, and apparently getting bigger, but it did appear to be turning east, toward the Florida panhandle or Mississippi. Still, with a storm that large, even a near miss could create problems that would make it worth leaving the city for a couple of days. At Alice’s urging, Craig called their hotel in Oxford and double-checked their reservations for the next three nights—Saturday, Sunday and Monday. They would check first thing in the morning, and if the storm hadn’t started to dissipate, or if it changed directions, they would pack up and head for Oxford.

  Craig left the tiki lamps up in the backyard, jammed garbage bags full of newspaper, crawfish husks, used lemons, corncobs and paper towels, tied them shut and dragged them to the curb, gathered beer bottles and put them in the recycling box, while Alice got the kids to bed and washed dishes and wiped down the kitchen counters. Then they and their neighbors and most of the rest of the city went to sleep.

  5

  Overnight, the National Weather Service revised its projections for the storm’s path. The high-pressure system that the meteorologists thou
ght would continue to push the storm eastward did not hold, and the storm, which had drawn strength steadily from unusually warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, began once more to angle north by northwest, toward New Orleans. The projections had it hitting late Sunday night or early Monday morning, although there was still, conceivably, time for it to change its course again. The weather report usually offered a cone of possibility, an angled path within which the storm would likely travel. On Saturday morning, New Orleans was again in the middle of it.

  By the time Craig was up and making coffee the early news shows were full of grim talk about the storm, now a Category 4 hurricane named Katrina. The Weather Service ranked hurricanes in categories, according to the strength of their winds, with Category 1 having winds below 95 mph, and Category 5 winds over 155, certain to cause widespread catastrophic damage. Anything ranked Category 3 or higher was considered to be extremely dangerous. The city was being evacuated.

  Leaving was still technically voluntary, but the police and state troopers were setting up contraflow, in which the interstate highways leading into and out of New Orleans were all turned into outbound routes. Ordinarily, given the news, Craig and Alice would have been packed up and nearly ready to leave, somewhat insulated from worry by the fact that the storms always seemed to miss the city and nothing bad had ever happened to their house or their immediate neighborhood. Still, they would leave to avoid the inconvenience and discomfort of a possible electrical failure; they would arrive at the Lamplighter in Oxford, get settled, wake up in the sunny, familiar-feeling hotel room and walk down to the courthouse square and eat breakfast, run into other New Orleans evacuees, go to the book shop, visit William Faulkner’s house, eat at the fun restaurants and head home after the danger had passed. Craig actually looked forward to the break.