City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  His pulse at such moments was elevated, heart pumping and breath coming hard, and when he would get the crucial moment of distance and take a slightly calmer breath, sometimes tears would come to his eyes. He knew what this was; he had heard about post-traumatic stress disorder for years in other contexts, and it didn’t take a PhD to recognize it. When it would hit him he would get up and take a walk outside for a minute and clear his head if he could.

  Privately, Craig called this the Weird Anger, in an effort to encapsulate and reduce its power, but when it came it was almost overwhelming. There were other symptoms, such as the bouts of crying that came out of nowhere, triggered by almost nothing. Someone would ask him how his home was—using the word “home” and not “house”—and he would feel his stomach buckle and he would be unable to answer. If they said “house” he could usually get through the conversation. Or walking into a store and hearing Louis Armstrong playing over the sound system and having to turn around and walk out, covering his eyes. Any display of empathy, even those that did not go past the surface, could reduce him to tears, and Alice reported the same thing. Even the most obvious tourist emblem—a drawing of jazz musicians playing in a gift shop, or even the French Market brand coffee, for example, that the Brunners had bought to make them feel at home, could immobilize them with instant and overwhelming grief. The memory of the tenderness, the generosity of spirit, that was in the air in New Orleans, the small things that everyone they knew seemed to appreciate, the appreciation for the fleeting hours and minutes, expressed in gratitude and dance and eating together…Anyone who indicated that they understood what the loss of that meant, or indicated even that they couldn’t understand, but that they sympathized, felt like a friend for life, and at the same time made palpable how much they had all lost. Or might have lost, since nobody was sure yet what parts of the city had been affected in what ways.

  On Tuesday, a week after they had arrived in Chicago, Craig was sitting at his table at Brew Horizon when his cell phone rang. He was trying to encapsulate and neutralize one of the Weird Anger attacks. This one had been triggered by a thin fellow in a yellow and black bicycle riding outfit, carrying his helmet and waiting on line with his own personal travel mug, which he obviously carried with him everywhere. He appeared to Craig to be very satisfied with his life—proud, very likely, of his solar panels and recycling bin, his virtuous light conservation policies at home—the type, Craig thought, who thinks cars should share the road with bicycles, who rides in traffic and gets righteously indignant when drivers don’t treat him like another car. Didn’t he understand that cars are large, and powerful, and that he existed only by their sufferance, that they could knock him over if they hit him? Didn’t he understand how dangerous the world is? It was criminal, sang every nerve in Craig’s body, to gauge the forces around you so lightly—someone needed to tell this fool—criminal to assume that there is a right order of things, that someone who has not been adequately socialized by your rules won’t break through and crush your satisfied, healthy, enlightened ass up against a wall until blood comes out of your ears, smash your fucking bike to fucking pieces…

  The phone rang again. Craig felt faintly nauseated, in need of a walk, but on the third ring he checked it, saw a local number he didn’t recognize, and decided to answer.

  “Yeah.”

  “Have I reached the Swiss Family Donaldson?” the voice said.

  “Who is this?” Craig said.

  “Ah, how quickly they forget old friends. Craig, It’s Peter. Morehead.”

  “Peter!” Craig said. His friend from the CHI EYE, his old friend…vertigo in the stomach, the shift from the magnetic field of the Anger to this avatar of the Lost World, the Old World, of friendship and family and continuity…Peter…“How’s it going? I’m sitting here in my new coffee shop in trendy OffWabash…” shifting into the familiar mode, the deflective cleverness mode, the old-friends mode…

  “Well the question is how’s it going for you? Is your house allright? Bring me up to date.”

  Craig liked Peter’s voice; it was a cultivated voice, yet a vernacular one, familiar yet without any unwarranted breaches of good manners. How was he supposed to give a measured, civilized answer to this direct question? He did the best he could to tell his friend what he knew, how he was, how Alice and the kids were, what he knew about their house and neighborhood. Like everyone, Peter wanted to know what Craig thought about the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, what he had heard about the various parts of town, about the reports of police looting and deserting, about Craig’s job. Craig told him as much as he could, and even before he had a chance to ask Peter about whether there was any work at the EYE, Peter brought up the topic himself.

  “Well,” he said, as Craig spun out an extended cadenza about the evacuees and the potential political meaning of the diaspora that was under way, “before you waste any more of this insight in conversation with me, how would you like to write something for the EYE about it?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Well, yes, in fact. Let me tell you what we had in mind. I’ve already spoken about it with Lee Binner, our editor. We’d like you to think about doing a series for us on the storm, the diaspora. One a week, say fifteen hundred words each. Longer if you want. There are at least a couple thousand evacuees in the Chicago area right now, and there are sure to be more. We’d like to hear what they have to say, and we would like you, as at least a temporary transplant to Chicago yourself, to report on what the city is like over the course of, say, the next two months or so, more or less anything you want to do. And we’ll pay you a thousand dollars a column. Not a princely sum, but maybe it will help a little.”

  After expecting at most to be offered an article or two, or some freelance copyediting work, Craig was overwhelmed. Craig had chafed at not having sufficient opportunity to do his own writing while at Gumbo. Borofsky kept him too busy editing nightlife supplements. This was almost too good to be true.

  “Peter…” Craig stammered for a little equilibrium. “Are you serious?”

  “Stop asking me that. We consider this a good opportunity for us. Okay?”

  “Of course. I feel like I’ve been going crazy not being able to do anything…this is just…amazing.”

  “Well, don’t go crazy. And let’s have lunch once you have a clear day next week. Does that sound good?”

  “It sounds better than anything I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  Peter chuckled and said, “We’ll trim that out of the final version. I’m sure it’s a bit of an overstatement. You always had a flair for the dramatic.”

  “Says the former secretary of Theater Arts.” This was the college drama organization, to which they had both belonged.

  “I’ll start the paperwork going for your first check; I’m sure you can put it to good use. Do you think you can write the first one for us by Friday? Just sort of introducing yourself and letting the readers know how you got here?”

  “Friday?” Craig said. “Sure. Sure I can do that.”

  “Good. If you can get that in I’ll edit it over the weekend and we can get rolling.”

  After he got off the phone Craig closed up shop at Brew Horizon for the day and went back to tell Alice about this good luck.

  Craig titled his column “Down In The Flood,” after the Bob Dylan song. Following Peter’s suggestion, he wrote the first one about their evacuation and how they got to Chicago, and what they were struggling with in thinking about the future and the present and the past. It was a solid, lyrical column, which he wrote at Brew Horizon in two days. He could as easily have written five thousand words as the fifteen hundred he turned in. Peter did very little to it in the way of editing, published it and got him a check in the middle of his second week there. A thousand dollars a week was almost too good to be true, but Peter meant it, and Craig took Alice out to dinner with the first check when it came, while Gus and Jean babysat the kids.

  15

  Lucy awoke, heard breat
hing as if someone asleep next to her, sat up heart racing. Milky light gave a dim, bluish cast to an interior, a room. She had been dreaming about something that was already beyond retrieval, and she had no idea where she was. Obviously others in the room, sleeping.

  “Samuel,” she said in a stage whisper, propping herself up on her elbows, then quiet to see if an answer would come. There was a bunk above her; she was in a bunk bed. She looked down at her legs under the sheet; there she was.

  By then she was remembering, and she didn’t call her brother’s name again. She lay back down on the thin mattress. After a few moments looking up at the bottom of the bunk above, she sat up again, carefully, legs over the side of the bed, still in her clothes from the night before, ran her hand over her face a couple of times. People sleeping in another bunk bed maybe six feet away, and in a cot set crossways by the small window that let in the day’s first light. Heavy funk of bodies that had spent five or six days unwashed in the Superdome or the Convention Center, then on that bus, and the almost palpable heaviness of sleep filled the small space.

  She stood up, slid on her shoes and walked to the door, opened it as quietly as she could, and stepped outside into the humid Missouri morning air. They hadn’t been able to see much of the place the night before. Their bus had pulled in, near midnight, after long hours on interstates through Texas and Arkansas, and state roads, and then county roads, and finally on gravel and dirt, through a countryside hooded in darkness, dark farming country with no face, no landmarks. Under lights strung up on poles they were greeted by anxious-looking white folks who brought them into a low cinder-block hall, took their names and addresses, and assigned them places in cabins, where they set down whatever they had managed to bring with them and fell asleep.

  Their destination was this place, Little River Camp, used for one week a year as a Bible study camp by Methodist youth, and for another two by ministers for annual retreats, a collection of twenty-eight small cinder-block cabins, a larger cinder-block dining hall and another cinder-block common building, all bare of anything but the hardware of beds and no-frills chairs. There was also a chapel building with pews, and two trailers that could serve as offices. It took up no more than four acres in the middle of miles of fields stretching off as far as you could see. They had ended up here by the merest chance, after being turned away from two facilities, one in Texas and one in Arkansas, that were full. The bus driver’s cousin was a minister and he thought he had heard of this place and the driver had called him and the Red Cross was contacted. They told them to come on, and then ran around putting together the basics of bedding and hygiene and food on about ten hours’ notice.

  Lucy walked out of the tiny cabin, which was shaded by tall trees of a type she had never seen, and stood on the small, crumbling lozenge of cement in front of the door. In the distance someone walked deliberately across a stretch of gravel, probably one of the Red Cross. Other than that, nothing stirred. From one of the cabins in the distance she heard a baby crying.

  She didn’t want to go back inside, so she decided to take a little walk around, see if she could find a cigarette. She had no idea what time it was, couldn’t remember what they had said about meals; they had said a lot of things very quickly, and not much of it stuck. Lucy walked across the sandy area in front of her row of cabins, toward the low building where they had taken their names the night before. It was hot already.

  She came out into the gravel parking lot where they had gotten off the buses and looked past another row of cabins, across what seemed at first a great emptiness, planted with what looked like dead shrubbery. As she walked to the edge of the brownish field it came into focus for her, and she said the word to herself: “Cotton.” She let herself look around, 360 degrees, and all she saw was cotton fields. That was the emptiness they had been driving through the night before. The camp was a small, tree-shaded island in the midst of it all.

  The door of the low building was open, and there seemed to be some kind of activity going on inside, so she walked over and poked her head in.

  “Oh!” a voice said, one of the white people in charge of the camp, a short lady with light brown hair, wearing a white polo shirt and khaki shorts. “We have a customer,” she said merrily, walking over to Lucy. “Come in, come in! At least someone was listening last night when we gave out the mealtimes. How are you? Did you have a good sleep? You must be exhausted. My name is Shauna.”

  “Allright,” Lucy said, nodding at the lady and putting out her hand to shake the hand the lady proffered. “I’m Lucy.”

  “The food is over there at that window. Just get you a plate on that table and head right on through. Doesn’t look as if you’ll have to fight the crowds!”

  Lucy smiled politely and looked over to the serving window where a large white man in a yellow T-shirt stood. “I might eat in a while,” she said. “I was hoping I could find a cigarette. You don’t have no cigarettes here?”

  “Oh no,” the woman said, pursing her lips and putting a naughty sparkle in her eyes. “I’m not a smoker. I’ll bet you Steve might let you have a cigarette. He’s from the EMS, but I don’t think he comes in until eight-thirty.”

  “Uh-huh,” Lucy said. “Well thank you. I’m-a take a walk around. Y’all have phones?”

  “We’re working on getting them,” the woman said, her tone contracting just a bit because of what she took to be Lucy’s abruptness. “We should have some phones for you to use later on today.”

  “Okay,” Lucy said, starting to walk off. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t miss breakfast,” the woman said, with some alarm. “We have a lot of food that’s going to go to waste if people don’t eat it. We stop serving at eight-thirty on the dot.”

  “What time it is now?”

  The woman looked at her wristwatch and said, “It’s ten after eight…”

  “I’ll be back,” Lucy said. “Is that cotton?”

  “Yep, it surely is,” the woman said. “We’re about a month away from harvest!”

  “Allright,” Lucy said, walking off. The woman frowned, puzzled, then turned to the man behind the serving window and shrugged.

  Lucy was already making plans for what she needed to do. First and foremost was to figure out how to start finding Wesley. And SJ. And, second, she needed to know who the person was who could make her time at this place as smooth as possible. She needed some fresh clothes sooner than soon. With any luck she would not be there long. But however long it would be, she needed to hook things up. It looked to her more or less as if she was starting at zero.

  Lucy Williams was nothing if not a survivor. She had barely started eleventh grade in 1966 before she quit school, pregnant with her first son, Albert, born severely handicapped. Albert had been the beneficiary of Lucy’s extended family, which took him in and took up the slack and found a way and filled out the forms and called cousins and made sure he was clean and fed during those times when Lucy was out of control. But the boy had died when he was nine, from a respiratory ailment that came out of nowhere and killed him in two days.

  Wesley had been a surprise for thirty-seven-year-old Lucy, an accident; his dyslexia and slight hyperactivity may or may not have been a result of the cocaine she had been smoking at the time and which had exaggerated the recklessness that resulted in his conception. Her decision to keep him was questioned by everyone except Lucy herself, who reasoned, to her friends, that the welfare money that his arrival would generate would be a help around the home. That’s what she told her friends, but there was something else, harder to define, in the mix; she just had a feeling that this baby wanted to live. She kept him for good and bad reasons, both. One set or the other would be in the forefront, depending on how high she was.

  After Wesley’s birth she straightened out for a while; SJ had rehabbed the house on Tennessee Street for her and the baby, and she moved back to the Lower Nine in 1989 with her two-year-old, from a depressing apartment building off of Jackson Avenue. But the rocks and the
bottles continued to be an undertow for her, and she would go in and out of that life, unpredictably. In recent years her weakness had been alcohol. She loved Wesley, and Wesley loved her. And yet there was a part of her that was separate from him and everybody else, that needed to be dissolved in drink or smoke, answerable to nobody, and that part had made her be absent for Wesley at important times.