by Tom Piazza
He sat down on the chaise next to her. “Did you get any sleep?” he whispered to her.
“Yes. I was scared for a while but then I went to sleep. Malcolm went to sleep right away.”
“Malcolm can sleep through anything except a normal night.”
“Where’s Mommy?”
“I don’t know. You want to go find her?”
Annie nodded and sat up and they started off to the exit, but Craig stopped, looking back at their stuff. “I don’t think anyone’s going to bother our stuff, do you?”
Looking back at their little camp, Annie shrugged. Craig went back and retrieved his cell phone; Alice had apparently taken her Big Bag…They could go. Everybody there was in the same situation.
Upstairs they found Alice standing in a group of people watching one of several TVs positioned throughout the lobby, where the news was being reported live from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
“Where’s Malcolm?” Craig said.
Alice pointed to the couch right behind her, where Malcolm was totally immersed in a small truck that he was driving into an abyss between two cushions. “It missed New Orleans,” Alice said. “At the last minute it jogged east.”
“What?” Craig said. “It missed the city completely?”
“Not completely,” Alice said. “But it was weaker than they thought it would be, and it went off to the east.”
All around the lobby people—black and white, young and old—ambled around, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts, or lolled, asleep, in sleeping bags on the floor and on couches. Around the televisions, denser groups of people sat, surfacing from sleep, hopeful that the storm had in fact, like so many others, missed the city.
On the television a reporter in a yellow poncho with the hood up was reporting from a side street in the blowing wind; the screen showed serial images of downed trees, glass windows blown out of a hotel, a traffic light that had come off its wire and was sitting, broken, in the middle of a street, looked like around Howard Avenue, Craig guessed. The reporter was saying, “This is still a very dangerous storm; anyone listening needs to stay inside to avoid getting hit by flying debris. It is not safe outside yet. As I was saying, here is the view down Canal Street, we have a number of trees over and broken windows, and it’s just a mess out here. So stay inside, but, again, it does seem as if New Orleans has dodged the bullet once more, as Hurricane Katrina heads off to the northeast…”
Craig and Alice put their arms around each other and stood there for a long moment, watching.
“Can we go home?” Annie said.
“Not just yet,” Craig told her. “We need to make sure it’s all clear and then see what’s happening with the traffic.”
“They have a buffet over there,” Alice said.
“I could use some coffee. Did Malcolm eat?”
“Yes, but he’ll have to eat again before we start back. I’ll start packing up.”
“Let’s give it a little while before we start back,” Craig said. “We should see what’s happening with the electricity.”
“I can’t spend another night on that chaise lounge,” she said.
“Well, it doesn’t look as if you’ll have to.”
They stood there together for a moment, looking blankly at the television images. “I can’t keep doing this every month,” Alice said. “This is crazy.”
Craig was about to say “It’s not ‘every month’,” about to step on the rapidly moving walkway that led to one of their entrenched arguments, but he stopped himself. He was too tired, and too close to the edge, and he knew Alice was, too. So, instead, he said, “Let’s get through this and we can talk about it when we get back, right?”
Alice pressed her lips together, nodded, looked up at him, right in his eyes, for a long moment. “I love you,” she said.
Craig frowned, smiled at her, said, “Really?”
“Yes.” She put her arms around him and hugged him with her head on his chest, and they stayed that way for what were, for Craig, several long, blessed moments during which all the pain of the world disappeared.
Craig got himself a cup of coffee and got some cereal for Annie, and then he and Annie went out for a walk to look around. The sky was gray and mottled—the outer edge of the hurricane as it made its way north—but they walked out, holding hands, through the parking lot and down the hill on the sidewalk to the intersection. Craig treasured these moments when he could get away with Annie. Alice tended to make her nervous and quiet, but when they were alone she asked Craig questions about everything, and shared her own developing inner life with him. Now, walking, she asked if New Orleans was still going to be there when they got back, and Craig assured her that New Orleans would still be there and would always be there.
“I want to always live in New Orleans,” Annie said, and Craig heard the words with a happiness that, even as he held on to them, he knew wasn’t quite right. It was his love of New Orleans he was hearing reflected, and that he needed to hear reflected, not hers, not exactly. He knew that putting the weight of his own needs on her would do her no good in the long run. But for right then, after the upset of the past couple of days, he would let this be their I-Love-New-Orleans club. He needed it.
Then she asked him what made hurricanes happen, and Craig struggled briefly to retrieve enough information in his mind to fashion a coherent answer that could satisfy her as they walked part of the way up another block. But by that time the first few drops of rain had started falling. It began as barely perceptible needle-pricks of drizzle, and then those began to be interspersed with drops that felt fat and round like grapes, and Craig knew that the sky was about to open up. They ran back to the motel, getting pretty well soaked in the last fifty feet. They stopped under the canopy and watched it coming down in sheets, with a sound like frying bacon.
“Wow,” Craig said, “we just made it.”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go see what Mommy’s doing.”
They found Alice back in the pool area, gathering their stuff. Annie went off to grab Malcolm and walk him around the pool. “Maybe we ought to sit tight and see what the storm is doing before we give up the space.”
Alice looked up at him. “I’m not staying in this pool another night,” she said. “I don’t care if we have to sit in traffic for another ten hours.”
“Listen to what I’m saying,” he said. “It’s not just the traffic. If we head back now we’ll be driving through the storm. Look what it’s doing outside. We need to wait until it passes.”
“Fine. I’ll pack up the car and we’ll leave after the storm passes.”
“The roads might not be passable. There might be flooding.”
“Craig,” she said, exasperated.
“Fine,” he said. “Pack up the car.” He walked away.
Craig got himself a bagel with peanut butter from the buffet. He walked over to a group of people who had gathered to watch the news coverage from New Orleans on one of the four or five TVs. It was somewhere around ten a.m., and people were crowded onto the three couches near the TV, and another ten stood around. A newscaster, his face eerily lit against a darkling, chaotic background that turned out to be the Superdome, was saying that parts of the roof were blowing off the building and it was raining in on the people who had taken shelter there. One short white woman with a definite New Orleans accent standing next to Craig said, to no one in particular, “The power went out on ’em.”
Craig said, “It looks like they have lights, though.”
The short woman looked at him, half-smiling. “Dat’s the backup generators, dawlin’. We’ll see how long dat last.”
A heavyset African-American man in a blue and red polo shirt, standing on the other side of Craig, said, “The power is out in the whole city it looks like.”
That, Craig knew, was more or less to be expected after a storm of that size. Outside the sky was dark, but they were inside, they were warm, they had the television going, there was food. They were okay for a while. Craig kn
ew that he wouldn’t relax until he knew just how bad the damage was. It did sound as if the city had escaped the worst once again. If the power was in fact out and the storm was still going, they were certainly not going back to the city that night. Alice was reading Sense and Sensibility on a couch, with Annie next to her drawing in a sketchbook and Malcolm on his knees looking over the back of the couch at someone, making faces.
Restless, Craig walked out front under the motel canopy. People smoked and looked out at the rain and the abnormally dark sky, punching numbers in on cell phones; once in a while someone would come running up to the shelter with a jacket over his head, looking around, smiling. Craig pulled out his cell phone to call Bobby. His first try yielded nothing; on his second he got an “All circuits are busy; please try your call again later” message. He waited for five seconds, tried it again, same thing. He flipped the phone shut, looked around. He noticed the heavyset African-American man from inside, closing his own phone and shaking his head, looking over at him.
“Yours, too?” Craig said.
“I think they are all down,” the man said.
Craig asked the man if he was from New Orleans, and the man said he was.
“So are we,” Craig said. “What part of town?”
“Gentilly,” the man said. “Up off Mirabeau.” Craig knew the area as a middle-class black neighborhood of tidy, almost suburban homes.
“Oh yeah,” Craig said. “Are you going back tonight?”
The man looked at him as if to see whether he was joking. “I don’t think any of us is going back in tonight. They have to send in tree crews, electric. It’s going to be a few days.” The man chuckled.
Craig checked his watch; it was just after eleven. Maybe it was subliminally noticing a line of cars backed up by the light at the corner, their headlight beams cutting through the driving rain, maybe it was something else, but on an impulse, an intuition, Craig felt for his car keys in his pocket, moved to the edge of the canopy, gauged the distance to his car and, taking a deep breath, made a run for it, got in soaked, and drove it to the gas station on the corner, waited for five minutes in a line of three cars and then filled up the Toyota with gasoline. Later, when the power went down in Jackson and the gas pumps couldn’t pump, he would look back on that, at least, as one good decision he had made.
Back in the motel, Craig noticed something slightly different in the tempo of things, a different deployment of people somehow, some difference in the distribution of people, and then he saw Alice gesturing to him across the long lobby from one of the couches where she was gathered with a large group, watching the television.
Something was wrong; he could tell that by the looks on people’s faces.
As he arrived, one of the reporters, on the street in what appeared to be the central business district, a deserted side street, was speaking into the camera, saying, “As we said a few moments ago, we don’t know where this water is coming from. One city official told us they thought it might be a broken water main, but we now have word, just in, a report of a possible breach in a levee along Lake Pontchartrain that might be connected in some way to this water. These reports are very preliminary, though, Regina, and of course we’ll keep you up to date as we find out more.”
9
Wesley awoke from a fitful sleep on his friend Roland’s couch; his T-shirt was wet with sweat, and the lights, which had been on when he fell asleep, were off, along with the air-conditioning and the rest of the power. His cell phone said it was 10:09 in the morning. Outside, rain was spitting and splattering against the windows. Trees blowing.
He got up, walked to the door of Roland’s bedroom, where his friend was asleep, mouth open, holding desperately onto a pillow, a comforter tangled around his bare legs. Wesley walked into the darkened kitchen, opened the refrigerator, which was still cool inside, felt for the carton of milk, opened it, smelled it, and drank greedily from it. They were still there. One more hurricane.
Back in the living room he retrieved his cell phone and walked out onto the screen porch. He wanted to call over to SJ’s house and check on them, but he knew his uncle would be angry with him for not showing up to help the previous morning, and also for not staying by his mama’s house overnight as he had said he would.
He had been staying at Roland’s most nights for the past two weeks. There was another young man in the Lower Nine who had gone out a couple of times with Chantrell, and Wesley had heard that the young man, whose name was Elias, had been talking about fucking Wesley up because he had hit Chantrell. Wesley didn’t take the talk completely seriously, but anyway he also liked to be off on his own sometime instead of just at his mama’s house. He and Roland delivered pizzas for Café Roma four nights a week; they liked to ride the bikes, talk bikes, just chill together, watch a movie, play PlayStation. Roland also had a widescreen plasma they liked to watch movies on. Roland’s uncle, who owned the house, wasn’t around much.
Wesley tried Chantrell’s number and got an “all circuits busy” message. Then he called his friend Ray-Ray and got the same thing. He stood looking out absently at LaHarpe Street, waiting for his head to clear from sleep. The street in front of Roland’s house had flooded a bit at the edges, nothing special in a heavy rain. They had put the motorbikes in the shed in back, the way they always did, to keep them out of sight. He debated about going to get them and putting them on the porch, but the bikes would be too visible on the porch and the rain seemed to be slacking off. He figured they were safest where they were for right then at least.
He went back inside but it was dark and there was nothing to do with all the power off.
Restless. He tried the cell phone again; no luck. Then he thought to try Roland’s phone, which had no dial tone when he picked up. His own cell said it was just about ten-thirty. He found his jeans on the leather chair where he had left them folded, a habit he’d learned from his Uncle SJ, snapped them open and pulled them on leg by leg over his boxer shorts. He uncrumpled his white socks and got them on, then his sneakers. He grabbed his keys and money from the coffee table and headed out to look around. He would let Roland sleep a while.
Wesley made his way in the light rain and wind to the end of the block, turned left and then cut across a short street and came out on the corner of Broad a block from where Bayou Road made its diagonal cut, headed for the Fairgrounds. He crossed Broad, which was empty of cars. Across the middle of the street, a gigantic piece of twisted metal that looked like part of a store awning, and a garbage can rolling back and forth in the middle of the street like a severed head. The traffic lights were out. The dogleg of Bayou Road merged into Gentilly Boulevard, the street and sidewalks full of downed branches, leaves and debris, wood, shingles, glass thick on the ground, gnarled lengths of gutter. One house seemed to have had its roof torn off, and a little bit past it Wesley saw the roof, fractured and sitting on edge, between the house and the one next to it. Two men stood looking at it. A few people were out on their porches.
As he made the curve onto Gentilly Boulevard, Wesley saw a disturbing vista in the distance, as if a mirror had been laid over the street reflecting the wide, dark canopy of oak trees so that the same image was reflected upside down. It was disorienting. For a few blocks in front of him there was only a little water on the sides of the boulevard, by the curbs, but six or seven blocks down, water covered the narrow grass median strip in the middle of the road and made the glassy illusion.
He headed for a grocery store two blocks down, thinking to see if there was anything to eat. A few people were carrying groceries out of the store’s dark interior and putting them into an SUV that sat at the curb in water up to the middle of its hub caps. Wesley recognized one of them as Roland’s cousin, a slightly older fellow named Lonnie. Lonnie acknowledged him briefly as he passed carrying a bag of groceries.
“Where Roland?” Lonnie said.
“He sleeping back at the house,” Wesley said.
Lonnie looked very disturbed. “He still aslee
p?”
“Yeah,” Wesley said.
“The canal broke,” Lonnie said. “They had a break up by Mirabeau. That’s where all this water come from. We got to get out of here.”
Wesley said, “Where you heard that?”
“Kwa-ME,” Lonnie shouted into the store, ignoring Wesley’s question. He stepped up into the store and left Wesley on the sidewalk. The water in the distance seemed to have crawled nearer, but it was hard to be sure. Lonnie came out of the store at a trot, dashing past Wesley. “You going to come with me or not?”
Wesley’s first thought was to get to his uncle’s house and make sure his Mama was okay. He climbed into the Explorer without knowing where Lonnie meant to go. “We got to get Roland,” Lonnie said. “When we get to the house, run inside and get him. Not walk, you hear?”
“You can bring me down Claiborne to my uncle house?”
Lonnie looked at Wesley as if there were something wrong with him, and didn’t answer. Halfway back to Roland’s house the water looked too deep for the Explorer to continue straight to their destination.
“I can’t get through here,” Lonnie said. “Meet me on Esplanade by the red statue. You know the statue?” Esplanade Avenue was laid along a slight rise, the highest ground in the area.
“Yeah.”
“Meet me there.”
Wesley got out of the car as Lonnie turned and the Explorer cut a wake through the shin-deep water, and he ran, high-stepping, through the water for a block and a half the rest of the way to Roland’s house. He let himself in, dripping water across the living room all the way to Roland’s bedroom, where he saw only Roland’s empty bed.
Wesley hollered out his friend’s name, dashed into all the rooms of the house, but his friend was gone, no question about it. When he was absolutely sure, he started for the front door at a run, then he remembered their bikes. He turned around, ran back through the kitchen and opened the back door and saw that the yard was a lake, the water knee-deep against the shed. The bikes had to be flooded, he knew, if they were even still there. But he opened the door anyway and ran across the yard, opened the shed door enough, hard against the water, to see the bikes there, in water to the tops of the wheel rims. He got back into the house dripping water all over, looked around, made sure that he had his cell phone, and headed out to meet Lonnie.
