City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  “Only French yellow mustard. We stay cousin Westbank,” Minh said.

  When they had their sandwiches, Minh said he would put it on account, he had to hurry, and SJ and Bootsy thanked him and walked down the street together, enjoying their sandwiches.

  “I love a goddamn ham sandwich, J,” Bootsy said. “Only thing I like better be a liver cheese sandwich, and a Big Shot pineapple soda. I wish they had the brown mustard though.”

  They walked along, slowly, the occasional car passing on North Claiborne. They talked some about the Saints game Friday night, about this and that.

  “Lucy staying by you?” Bootsy asked.

  “Yes,” SJ said. “I put up wood by her house earlier.”

  “Man, you were here for Betsy?”

  “I rescued people in a boat with my daddy.”

  “Mmmh,” Bootsy said. “We was in Kenner. Of course, being significantly”—he took pains to articulate the word despite the sandwich still in his mouth—“younger than you, I have less memory of those days.” There was a two-year age difference in Bootsy’s favor, which was a reliable source of pleasure for Bootsy when things got slow.

  Poker-faced, nodding slightly, SJ replied, “And it is impressive how you managed to put on so much more weight than I have in such a limited time.”

  “Look here, I still got my hair.”

  “Gray as it is.”

  They walked along North Claiborne, laughing occasionally, until they had finished the sandwiches and thrown the wrapping paper away in a garbage can at the corner of Reynes Street. They walked the neighborhood streets, through all the memories, which did not need to be spoken of because they were in them. The day was starting to cloud over just a bit.

  Around three in the afternoon Lucy came over to SJ’s house and they watched the television some. SJ made calls to his crew members and a few other people to make sure they were okay, told them to come by his house if they lost electricity. Around six o’clock SJ fried up some fish and he and Lucy got ready for the weather to roll in.

  It took the Donaldsons ten hours to reach Jackson, Mississippi, ordinarily less than a three-hour drive and less than half the way to Oxford. Cars broke down along the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway every half mile, it seemed, and traffic would need to merge and squeeze into one lane or another to get around them. At one point, traffic stopped completely for twenty-five minutes. Midway through the four-hour ride across the lake toward Mandeville, with all the stopping and going, Malcolm threw up in the backseat. The vomit smelled of soured milk and rotten vegetables, and the smell filled the car and Craig began to retch but fought the reflex back. They crawled along, when they were able to move, at five to ten miles an hour in the bilious heat, with all the windows open, Alice and Craig arguing about what to do. Alice reached back to clean Malcolm’s face and hands with some of the wet wipes she had brought, but they were no match for the magnitude of the problem. Craig refused to pull over, saying that the cops needed the breakdown lane clear to get past and handle the accidents and breakdowns, and besides, what were they going to do, just wipe out the seat and leave the wipes out there in a pile on the road? They needed to get across the lake, and he would not stop.

  When they finally made it across the causeway and put their front tires on solid ground again, they stopped along with hundreds of other evacuees at the first service station and waited on line for twenty minutes to use the clogged, fouled toilets. The attendant had given up refilling the paper towel dispenser and had left a few dozen banded bunches of paper towels there, many of which, used, littered the floor like piles of soggy leaves around the overflowing wastebaskets; you had to kick them aside to walk to the one toilet or one urinal in the men’s room. Craig tore open one of the paper bands and took three handfuls of the fresh ones, wet half of those with water from the faucet, and did his best to clean the backseat and get Malcolm clean. He got a couple of long looks as he came out of the restroom with all the towels, and he had been on the verge of asking one man what the fuck he was staring at, but he resisted the impulse.

  After half an hour they headed out again, and it was clear before long that they would not be spending that night in Oxford. The smaller roads they had to take through Mandeville and Covington to get eventually to I-55 were squeezed to stoppage like capillaries by edema, circulation choked, apoplexy on the near horizon. The Donaldsons spent hours in stopped traffic on small tree-shaded roads, single file, and then in go-five-feet-and-then-stop traffic, and then go-twenty-feet-and-then-stop traffic, and then traffic halted completely for ten minutes because of a car with a dead radiator blocking both lanes, then only one lane, and finally on I-55 north of McComb the traffic a steady twenty-five miles an hour until another accident halted things completely for twenty minutes.

  Pine barrens of Louisiana and southern Mississippi for hours, nothing to be seen but the endless line of red taillights stretching off into the afternoon as the light slowly drained from the sky. Craig and Alice agreed that they would not try for Oxford and would spend the night in Jackson, assuming they could find a place to stay. Oxford was another three hours past Jackson, even with no traffic, and they had no steam left; they were exhausted.

  At 7:30 p.m., ten hours after they had set out, the Donaldsons followed the curve of I-55 into Jackson, took the first exit possible, and drove around Jackson’s streets for fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, until they hit an arterial road that they followed north, hoping and praying to find some kind of small hotel that had been overlooked in the rush. Finally they topped a rise in the road and, from a distance, saw a sight that almost made them weep with gratitude, the bright lights of the Best Host Inn, nationwide beacon of comfort from coast to coast, with its familiar logo in pulsing neon out front, power, solidity, warmth, light…

  “What do we do if there are no rooms?” Craig said, thinking out loud.

  “We can’t keep going,” Alice said. “We have to find something.” Both the kids were asleep under the blanket in the backseat. It took five minutes to follow a long, slow line of cars into the parking lot. Neither Craig nor Alice said anything; obviously the chances were overwhelming that the place was full. Stopping the car would wake the kids up, but there was no real choice.

  Craig pulled the car over behind a dozen other parked cars; the lot itself appeared to be filled, and there were cars parked on the grass by a gated area that he took to be the pool. He got out and told Alice he would go inside to check out the situation, and she could stay there with the kids.

  A crowd filled the lobby, but to his surprise there was almost nobody lined up at the desk.

  Craig approached a tall, pleasant-looking clerk who gave him a commiserative look and, before Craig even reached the desk, said, “You know what I’m going to say, right?”

  “We’ll take anything,” Craig said.

  The clerk, pointed over behind Craig, toward the large, lodge-like lobby which Craig, zoned out, hadn’t even glanced at, and Craig followed the direction of the finger and saw, to his disbelief, the entire lobby spread with blankets, people on couches, on the floor, televisions going. From behind him, Craig heard the clerk say, “Every place in town is the same story.”

  Craig stared at the scene, sick in his stomach. A moment later he turned back to the clerk, who was holding up a finger, telling another newcomer to wait for a moment. “I have two small children. What do I do?”

  The tall clerk’s face softened a little, helplessness wrinkling the corners of his eyes. “We can put you down by the pool,” he said. “That’s the best I can offer you at this point.”

  “The pool?”

  “We have an indoor pool on the lower level. There are beach loungers down there; we can give you blankets and pillows. I wish we could do more. Or you can try and find a space on the floor in the lobby.” To another new person he said, “We’re full up; sorry.” Then to Craig, “Let me know what you want to do.”

  “Every place is like this?”

  “Yes sir,” the clerk s
aid, his tone already contracting slightly at Craig’s vacillating and the pressure of more arrivals.

  “Okay,” Craig said. “What do I need to do?”

  “Just go on down and pick a spot and then come back up and we’ll give you some bedclothes.”

  “Should I pay you now…?”

  The clerk waved his hand dismissively. “We’re not going to charge you to sleep in a beach chair at the pool.”

  A man who had approached the desk asked, “Does anyplace around here have any room?”

  Craig headed back out to the car and told Alice what the story was. “I guess we can just leave the car here; people are parked all over the place.”

  “We can’t sleep in the pool, for God’s sake,” Alice said. “Where are we going to change clothes? How can we sleep…”

  “Alice, look…” He took the standard deep breath. “There are people all over the lobby sleeping. All the rooms are sold out, and there are no rooms anywhere nearby. What do you want to do? Should we keep driving? I can’t do it. I say we just get it, claim our little place, make it an adventure”—Annie rustled in the backseat, waking up—“and make the best of it and then God willing we head back tomorrow. Or we head to Oxford tomorrow. We’ve got the room up there.” Alice finally agreed, and they moved inside.

  On the televisions in the wood-paneled living room of the lobby, images of the storm filled the screens in lurid color, with voices of urgent report, miles per hour, looking like a direct hit, radius equal to, water temperature, landfall estimated at, evacuations have been ordered for, storm surge as high as; this would go on all night as the country watched one of the largest storms in recorded history head straight for New Orleans. Unremarked in any of the reports were the dozens of places along the levee system that had been designed improperly, built improperly, and around which water had been seeping for years like blood from diseased gums. But it was all beyond anyone’s control now.

  7

  SJ fell asleep on the couch just as the sky began to lighten. The wind had started to rise as the sun went down the night before, and it had kept rising. The sound went from a whistling to something deeper, a groaning sound as if you were pulling a rope through a hole in a piece of sheet metal. This groaning started and stopped unpredictably, leaving only the whistling behind it. Odd moments of near-calm were ruptured by abrupt shrieks of wind. Lucy sat on the green upholstered chair in the living room; she could have slept in Camille’s room, but she didn’t want to be alone.

  SJ left the lights on so that he would know exactly when the power went off, which happened around one a.m. He was stocked with flashlights and batteries and candles if they were necessary. Somewhere around two in the morning, with the wind very high, he heard a loud, vibrating sound coming from the back of the house, off the kitchen; he made his way quickly to the back with his flashlight beam, slipped the dead bolt and opened the door and saw through the lashing rain that the rear gutter had come detached at one end and was waving around. Something large came flying through the beam and smashed into the old shed on the left side of the yard. He closed the door again and threw the bolt and something smacked into the side of the house with the sound of a door slamming, then there was a kind of clacketing sound like he remembered from putting baseball cards in his bicycle spokes when he was a kid, then that stopped.

  He knew there would be roof damage; the question was how much. He followed his flashlight beam up the stairs and looked in the rooms, sealed like tombs to the raging outdoors, the howling and groaning outside contrasted with a creepy stillness within. Two rooms; nothing apparently amiss. He walked back downstairs and spent the rest of the night prowling the house this way.

  He was on the couch with his flashlight in his hand at his side, he had fallen asleep, when something shook him. He sat up, still asleep in the gray morning light, but buffeted by something profound, like thunder he thought at first. As he listened, sleep draining from his head like water from a sieve, trying to determine its shape, a second pounding, shaking roar exploded and the house shook again.

  Now he was awake, and he knew what had happened, knew before he saw it. He ran to the front door and opened it to see a car rushing by, upside down on top of a foaming river of sticks and debris. A moment of free-fall in his mind before he slammed the door and reflexively started for the back of the house. Three steps and water was swirling around his feet, dragging at the cuffs of his trousers; he stepped higher, idiotically trying to keep his feet dry, when he realized he didn’t know where Lucy was. He hollered her name out, as loudly as he could, heard something break behind him and turned to see one of Rosetta’s vases fall off a pedestal and smash on a table, and as he watched the broken crater of the vase scoot across the room on the water the window on the right side of the house exploded—the image he had was of someone throwing up—it spewed inward, glass, sash and blinds, the foaming water following it into his house, and he turned and ran for the stairs, with the water up to his knees, yelling for Lucy, who had appeared in the door of the rear bathroom and seemed to be frozen in place. She was staring down at the water, and SJ went to her, the water now to his thighs, and took her by the wrist and when she didn’t move, said, calmly as he could, “We’ll be allright upstairs,” and she started following him and they made the stairs, the water now at their waists, and climbed, and by the fifth step they were out of the water, and he told her with his hand on her back to keep going, and he didn’t look back either. As long as the house doesn’t go, he kept thinking; as long as the house doesn’t go. He couldn’t feel the house shifting at all, but it was hard to tell with the wind shaking it. The upstairs bedroom was pitch dark and stifling hot. He felt for and found the flashlight he had laid on the dresser, and with it he located the matches and a candle, which he lit, concentrating on keeping his hand steady. He got Lucy settled and sat with her; they said a prayer together and she said it with her lips shaking. After she had stopped shaking, he got up and retrieved one of the gallon water jugs he had laid in upstairs along with some food for a couple of days, and pulled the plastic cap off of it and poured some into one of the glasses he had put up there and handed it to Lucy. She drank it.

  “I didn’t think we’d never use those supplies,” SJ said, trying to keep his voice as even as possible. “But that’s what Daddy always said, have a second floor and put food and water up there.”

  “I know that; Daddy said that,” Lucy said. “Daddy said that. Have you some water for three days.” SJ drank some, too. The radio was downstairs, useless now, even though he had batteries. He hadn’t thought to have a radio up in the room. When he was sure that Lucy was at least stable, he went to the stairs to try and see where the water was.

  The surface of the water was up to within two feet of the downstairs ceiling, and an unbroken river seemed to swirl from his living room out to the street. The façade of his house had been pulled off by the water. The seven feet he’d moved the house back from the sidewalk might have been the reason the house was still standing at all; the rush of water had been deflected by just enough. Then he thought about his van, and the truck. He sat still for a minute on the top stair, trying to breathe slowly, trying to gauge whether the water was still rising, and how quickly. It seemed to have slowed. He went back to check on Lucy.

  Lucy seemed to be hyperventilating and SJ sat with her in the wobbly candlelight and told her to look at him, which she did, and he said, “We are going to be allright. The worst is over. We are going to be allright.”

  She looked into his eyes, and nodded her head and said, “Where Wesley at?”

  “Wesley is allright. He’s in Gentilly by his friend. Wesley allright. Do you hear me?”

  She nodded, exaggeratedly, and then she began sobbing in his arms, shaking, and SJ held his older sister in his arms, and after no more than a few seconds, she said, “I be allright, SJ. I will be allright. But stay with me, don’t leave me here.”

  “Nobody going nowhere,” he said. “Nobody going nowhere.”r />
  8

  Craig woke up slowly, feeling as if he had had no rest at all, as if he were on a hospital gurney in a tank…some kind of tank…he drifted…then, suddenly, all awake, his heart pounding, he sat up, almost losing his balance out of the narrow, plastic-banded chaise lounge where he had spent the night, in the humid chlorine funk of the swimming pool room. Alice’s chaise was empty, as was Malcolm’s; Annie was dead asleep in hers.

  A sharp pain shot down through Craig’s shoulder blade; inhaling made the pain wow up. Your regulation sleep-in-the-wrong-position muscle freak-out. He stood up carefully. Around the cement floor that surrounded the rectangular pool were maybe fifteen other families in various attitudes of sleep. His watch said 8:30. The journalist in him felt as he did on the morning after a big and heated election, the itch to get the results. He wanted some coffee badly, and even worse he wanted to see the news, find out what had happened with the storm. But he couldn’t leave Annie there. He debated whether to awaken her.

  “I’m awake, Daddy.”

  Startled, he looked down at Annie, who was in exactly the same position as before, eyes closed, and wondered if it could have been someone else’s child talking. He kept looking at her, then he looked around the immediate area. He was tired.

  “Here, Daddy.”

  He looked back at Annie, quickly, and she seemed, again, unmoved, except for a smile that she was trying to hide, before she broke up in giggles.

  “You little fibber,” Craig said, bending down and tickling her. That was another thing he loved about his daughter: She joked, he thought, like a New Orleanian. Now she squealed at the tickling and Craig noticed someone nearby shift in their sleep and open their eyes, and Craig quickly stopped and said, “Shhhh…” to his daughter.