City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  Outside, now that the rain had all but stopped, neighborhood people were out on their porches, talking to one another across the street. The water had reached the second step on most houses, and the residents assumed, knowing nothing of the levee breaks yet, that it was from the heavy rain. Wesley made his way carefully through the water, which was just above his knees. As he waded, he again tried SJ’s number and Lucy’s number and now had no luck at all, not even a circuits-busy. Nothing. He replaced the cell phone in its faux-leather holster on his belt, thought about the water, then removed the phone from his belt and rigged it so that it would hang from the neck of his T-shirt. The streets were uneven and sometimes the water got deeper, sometimes shallower.

  On North Dorgenois, a block and a half from Esplanade, he saw an old lady across the street, in water up to her chest, holding on to an iron railing leading up to a shotgun house. She was looking down with a frown on her face; her wispy gray hair was pinned up and her yellow housedress ballooned around her in the water. She appeared frozen in place. Wesley called to her, asking if she were allright. The old woman looked slowly up at him, smiled slightly around her eyes, then turned back down to regard the water again with a frown.

  Torn, the thought of Lonnie waiting pressing on him, the urgency to check in with Lucy and SJ, but still this woman wasn’t moving, and Wesley waded across the street, careful not to lose his footing, until he was by the old lady on the other sidewalk. Again she looked up at him slowly with that smile, and said, “I was just going out to make groceries; I had the money in my pocket…”

  Wesley could tell that the woman was disoriented; he asked where she lived and she said “I stay by my daughter’s house.” Then he asked where she was going, and she looked him in the eye, puzzled slightly by the question, it seemed and, frowning slightly and laughing at the same time, her eyes clearing, she said, “I don’t know.”

  “This ain’t your house?” he said.

  “No…” she said, looking back down at the water.

  “Listen,” Wesley said, “it’s a flood from the canal. I’m going to carry you to Esplanade. You allright with that?”

  Her eyebrows went up slightly in mild wonderment and she shrugged, saying, “I guess that’s allright…”

  Wesley took a deep breath, set himself as well as he could, and then he slid his right arm under her arm and around her back, crouched down, closed his eyes as his head neared the water, feeling for the back of her knees; he found them, slid his left arm under them and with a sweep lifted her and stood full up, then began carrying the woman toward Esplanade. It was only after he had done it that he realized that he had submerged his cell phone as well. “Where did all this water come from?” she asked, almost amusedly.

  At Esplanade he was able to set her down on the ground. She was barefoot. He was unclear at that moment which way the statue was. Half a block down on Esplanade, the winking, twitching blue lights of a patrol car, and two officers, one white and one black, standing by it.

  Wesley told the old woman to wait where she was and he took off at a trot through the leaves and around the branches, one of them huge, that covered and crossed the wide, shaded avenue, to where the two police were, along with two patrol cars, one with its lights on. They took no apparent notice of his approach. The largest of the officers, the white one, leaned against one of the cars and a black officer with a shaved head leaned against another. They didn’t seem particularly concerned about anything.

  “Excuse me,” Wesley said, remembering, as he always did, SJ’s injunction to be polite to police. “Where the big statue at?”

  “You mean that statue?” the white officer said, turning only partially toward Wesley and tilting his head as if to point behind Wesley. Wesley turned around and saw the statue, right there at the place where Esplanade and Bayou Road forked in two. He could not see Lonnie’s Explorer. The officer was saying something to the black officer about overtime. Wesley saw no sign of Lonnie.

  “Did you see anybody around here in a green Explorer, like he waiting for somebody?”

  Now the white officer turned his head again toward Wesley. “Nobody supposed to drive through here.”

  Looking around for Lonnie’s Explorer, Wesley said, “There’s a old lady down here got trapped in the water and I carried her but she need help.”

  “Everybody got to go to the Superdome,” the officer said.

  Absently, and feeling a slight panic rising in his stomach for no reason he could identify quickly, Wesley looked around and said, “I got to find Lonnie and Roland.”

  “Sorry,” the big white officer said sarcastically. “I don’t know where Lonnie and Roland went.” That seemed to be the end of discussion as far as he was concerned.

  Now the black officer spoke up and said, “There are buses down at Claiborne shuttling people to the Superdome. You can pick up one there.”

  Wesley looked back up Esplanade toward where he had left the woman, whom he could no longer see.

  “That old lady can’t make it to Claiborne walking.”

  “This ain’t a limousine service,” the big officer said.

  The black cop gave his partner a stony look, stepped toward Wesley and led him a few steps away.

  “Where is the woman?” the officer said.

  “She’s down on the corner, but now I don’t see her.”

  “I’ll get down to her or send someone to look for her in a few minutes. Is the rest of your family safe?”

  “I don’t know. I was supposed to meet Lonnie and Roland. Lonnie said a canal broke by Mirabeau.”

  The officer frowned slightly. “We haven’t heard anything about a Mirabeau break. We heard the Industrial Canal broke into the Lower Ninth, maybe that’s what they were talking about.”

  Wesley looked at the officer. “What?” he said. “Why you said that?”

  “There was a levee break. The whole Lower Nine is under water.”

  “Why you said that?” Wesley repeated, hearing himself almost yelling at a police officer, but he was sliding suddenly down a steep incline with nothing to grab on to. “Where my Mama?” he said, hearing the hysteria in his own voice as if at a distance.

  Regarding the young man evenly and cautiously, the officer said in a steady voice, “Be cool, little brother. Your mama live in the Lower Nine?”

  Wesley was breathing hard and rapidly, looking at the officer, looking around in a panic. The beefy large white officer was walking over now, with his right hand on the gun in his holster, and the black officer waved his partner back with a look of annoyance.

  “Listen at what I’m saying,” the black officer said. “Your mama all right. They had buses to get the people out. They taking everybody to the Superdome. She allright. You need to get to the Superdome and you will find her there.”

  Wesley’s heart pounded against the inside of his chest, and he thought he was going to throw up. A storm of firing neurons in his mind pushed and pulled at him: Lonnie was not where he was supposed to be; these police didn’t know where the water was coming from; he should have stayed with his Mama and Uncle J; he lied to his uncle; maybe his Mama was drowned. He had started shaking, looking up and down the street. “I got to go home.”

  “Go down to Claiborne,” the officer was telling him, in a steady voice. “Don’t bother going down to the Nine; they got the buses down there bringing everybody to the Superdome. You hear me? That’s where they going to be.”

  Wesley nodded his head jerkily, looking up and down the street. His teeth were chattering. “I got to find my Mama and Unca J.”

  “You allright if you get to Claiborne.”

  Wesley started running down Esplanade toward Claiborne Avenue. Two blocks into the run he remembered the old woman, but there was nothing he could do about her now. He had done what he could do. He kept going, running when he could, toward Claiborne. A block and a half past Galvez Street there was water again, stretching off as far as he could see.

  10

  Through t
he morning they huddled in the sweltering dark. Outside, the wind howled like a madman in chains. For three hours Lucy and SJ sat, holding hands much of the time. When something hit the house with a sudden violence, Lucy’s hand would tighten on SJ’s. The light of the candles wobbled and threw shadows on the walls and the plywood covering the windows, as brother and sister waited for their new world to be revealed.

  The room was a capsized rowboat, under which they breathed the few remaining minutes of the illusion that this might all somehow be a passing nightmare. The dresser with the lace runner that Rosetta had bought just after their wedding, Rosetta’s small jewelry box, her combs—all of it where she had left it, just as she had left it; he had never had the heart or the desire to remove any of it. Perfume bottles. On the wall, flickering in the candlelight, the old framed print from their father’s house, of the man and woman in the field bowing their heads for the evening church bells. This was the armature that SJ had left in place for the years since she had died, around which he had constructed a careful life for himself, and tried to provide a continuity for Lucy, Camille, and Wesley.

  By ten a.m. the winds had noticeably lessened, and by eleven the worst of it was clearly over. The temperature in the bedroom had risen steadily; it was now above 100 degrees, and humid as a greenhouse. They could hear the water lapping under the bedroom floor; from outside they heard distant voices hollering. Lucy was breathing heavily. “Samuel,” she said. “There going to be snakes in that water. What if the snakes come up in the house?”

  “Snakes won’t come inside a house,” SJ lied.

  “SJ, I got to go. Where I’m supposed to go, SJ?”

  “Sister,” he said, “just take a flashlight and go into the bathroom.”

  “I ain’t got to do nothing but pee,” she said, still holding on to his hand.

  “You need me to walk you over there?”

  “I’ll be allright, SJ.” She stood up, let go of his hand reluctantly and took one of the flashlights, switching it on and walking out of the room, past the landing. SJ heard her stop for a moment before she reached the bathroom. When he heard no more, he called out, “Sister?” He waited another moment and then got up quickly and walked to the landing where Lucy stood looking down at the disturbed water eddying three steps down from where she was, replacing what had been the living room. The legs of the couch poked up out of the water, floating like a potato in a soup, curtains floating like weeds…

  “Nothing we can do about that right now, sister,” he said. “We are upstairs, we dry…”—he spoke to her calmly, as she stared down at the water—“If the house ain’t washed away yet it ain’t gonna wash away. We are safe for right now. You hear me, Loot?”

  She nodded.

  “Go on do your business. We going to be all right. They’ll send out rescue today certain, soon as the wind cuts out. We’ll pick up the pieces later. Come on.”

  “Yeah,” she said, walking into the bathroom. SJ went back into the other room without looking downstairs again. His heart beat rapidly against his ribs, or so it felt; the air was poisonously hot. He sat on the edge of the bed in the wobbly candlelight.

  When Lucy came back into the room SJ stood and said, “Come on sister and help me with this.”

  He walked to the window on the eastern side, raised the bottom part and felt with his fingers to where he had put the toggle hooks on the bottom of the plywood. He unhooked them, first one side, and then the other, and, with the bottom edge free, he pushed it out slightly so that he could see down the side of the house. The sight jolted him even though he had anticipated it; instead of the eighteen-foot drop to the ground between his house and George’s next door, there was water below the window, maybe five feet down. For a moment of vertigo he almost considered not finishing the job; he didn’t want to see what was out there. But he grabbed a chair from the desk, brought it to the window, stood on it and pulled down the top inner window six inches, then reached in with his fingers to feel for the upper left toggle hook.

  “Be careful, Samuel,” Lucy said. “Careful you don’t fall out.”

  SJ pushed slightly against the weight of the plywood to unhook the toggle, and—there—there went the toggle on the left side, and the plywood swung down to the right and the daylight slammed into the room from the triangle of window visible above and below the skewed, dangling plywood, and there, outside, was their new world.

  They were in a lake, roofs like the tops of submerged turtle shells, bunched together at angles to one another. The view kicked the mind like a boot kicking an anthill; once-coordinated functions in the brain suddenly aswarm with inscrutable and uncoordinated urgency, trying to piece sense back together. Treetops against their own reflections with water rippling around the branch tips, a slight current moving away toward the east. A voice hollering in the distance. Another.

  When the worst of the immediate shock had stabilized, SJ went to remove the wood from the bedroom’s front window, which gave onto the pitched slant of the peaked roof of the front part of the original one-story house. He put on a pair of old sneakers, then raised the bottom part of the inside window and climbed out, steadying himself and sitting for a moment on the windowsill. To his immediate left the roof slanted up at a thirty-degree angle, maybe four feet to its peak. He had built the camelback so it sat down not quite directly on the floor of what had been the attic, and the roof peak rose up between the windows on the left and right side. Down the slant of the roof to his right, he could see the gutters perhaps two feet above the surface of the muddy-looking water. Half the shingles on the roof had been torn away, down to the tar paper.

  He wanted to get to the peak of the front roof and look toward downtown and the canal and see what he could see. The houses that had not been smashed into matchsticks had obviously been pushed or floated off their piers and shifted so that they sat diagonally, or were pushed up against other houses. The damage seemed to even out a little the farther it got from the canal. All through the water floated knots and clots of smashed wood, the remains of other houses; the front grille of a car bobbed like a fish with its nose sticking out of the water. Easily two thirds of the houses on North Derbigny Street were gone. Forty yards away he saw someone halfway out an attic window.

  “Hey down there,” SJ called out. “Are you allright?”

  The man was answering, but SJ caught only a couple of the man’s words.

  SJ took several deliberate steps up, crabwise, crouching, to the peak of the roof, which he grabbed with his hands and looked over toward the Industrial Canal, where what looked like a long, shallow waterfall spilled water steadily into the lake that had been the Lower Ninth Ward. Off in the distance he could see the buildings of downtown.

  He counted the tops of eight houses visible between his house and the Canal. All the rest was water choked with occasional tree branches breaking the surface; the houses had been destroyed or submerged, smashed into the floating piles of weatherboard and two by fours and automobiles that undulated in the water for as far as he could see. A block away water bubbling and churning from a submerged, ruptured gas line. Below him, amid a cataract of smashed weatherboard, facedown in the water, a man, unmoving; his white T-shirt had ridden up his back almost all the way to his shoulders. A black dog swam by. Not twenty feet away, the sole of a sneaker stuck out of the water, held up by an ankle attached to an invisible leg, waving slightly, probably snagged on something below the surface…

  SJ closed his eyes. He held on to the roof ridge and kept his eyes closed for some seconds. Then a rising in his stomach, and he vomited down the side of his roof, once, and twice. Breathed through his nose. Then he spit after it, to clear his mouth, took in three deep breaths, which made him slightly light-headed, recovered.

  “Samuel?”

  “I’m allright,” he said to his sister.

  He edged slowly backward from the front of the house toward where the peak he straddled abutted the face of the camelback. He took hold of a vertical steel pipe, a pl
umbing vent that he had installed himself, bolted to the main stud with heavy-gauge U clamps in three places. He pulled against the pipe, and it was solid; there was enough room behind it to slip something, which was what he had wanted to know. If they needed to get down they could tie a rope around it, if he could find a rope upstairs.

  Back inside, SJ rinsed his mouth with water from one of the water bottles he had stashed. Lucy sat on the bed looking stunned and vacant. “Pack you a bag for when the rescue comes,” SJ said. He tried his cell phone, which was dead, then he walked across the landing to the other upstairs room, a combination storage room and office for his business. A tree had taken out part of the rear corner of the roof. He tried the land line extension he’d put in, but it was dead, too. He grabbed his old faux-leather-bound personal business phone book off the desk, quit the room and closed the door behind him.

  SJ got several pairs of socks and underwear out of the dresser and put them in his small green army duffel, along with two pair of slacks and two shirts. From the top dresser drawer he retrieved a gold piece and a watch that had belonged to his father, both of which he wrapped in a handkerchief. Rummaging, he found a brown cardboard folder with an embossed logo for the Cavalier Club in Houston. He opened it and saw a color photo taken at a table in a nightclub—he and Rosetta, must have been the late 1970s. She wore a dark green dress with what she called spaghetti straps on the shoulder. He remembered that dress. He still had the big mustache at the time. He took a long look at the photo. Then he folded it shut again and put it back in the drawer.

  Lucy had two main things on her mind, the first being Wesley. He had told her that he was staying by his friend Roland’s house, but her phone wasn’t working either so she couldn’t call him. After they got rescued she would go and try to find him up to that playground where he played basketball sometimes by the Fairgrounds. There would be people who would know where he was, anyway. Lucy was also without money, and worried about how she was going to get her monthly disability check, since it didn’t look like there was going to be any house to deliver it to and it was supposed to come on Thursday. But she knew the lady at the Social Security office up off of Franklin Avenue, she used to help Jaynell do her hair. Name of Mrs. Ferdinand. She would call her after they got someplace and she could help her track down the money. She wasn’t worried too much about where she was going to stay. If she had the money she could find a place to stay. But the first thing she needed to do was find Wesley.