by Tom Piazza
Lucy worked quickly. Emptying one box, she used it for the children’s clothes, throwing them in as quickly as she could separate them. The others she separated roughly at first into men’s and women’s. She kept one empty box under the table right in front of her for especially nice items, which she would toss in for further inspection later. Eventually she was joined by a thin, anemic woman who was a community volunteer, and who had been told by the harried woman to help Lucy. Several evacuees began drifting over, and since Lucy was the one apparently in charge, asked her when the clothes were going to be out.
“Come back in about an hour,” Lucy would say. If it was someone who looked slightly prosperous, she would add, “What your size?” The woman would tell her and Lucy would say, “I’m making a special box. I’m-a keep a eye out for you.” The word got around quickly that if you wanted to have your pick of the better clothes, Lucy was the one to talk to. If you had a dollar or two to slip her, it helped greatly. Cigarettes were good, too, as a donation; Lucy stockpiled them and resold them for a quarter apiece.
After lunch Steve got Lucy registered with two of the national bulletin boards for evacuees. They plugged in her address, her social security number, birthday, and the same for SJ and Wesley, minus the social security numbers. He asked if there were any relatives or friends whom she needed to contact, and she did mention Aaron and Dot in Houston. Steve said that they could try and contact them later that day. Outside the trailer a table had been set up under a canopy and other evacuees were lined up to use the cell phones. Others were lined up at a table to talk to a man she hadn’t seen before, who was taking down information.
When they had finished, Lucy thanked the young man; he had clearly gone out of his way for her, and she couldn’t quite grasp why, but she appreciated it.
“Well,” he said, “I can’t even imagine what y’all have had to deal with, and I’m just glad we’re here to help.”
She looked at him, guardedly, squinting slightly, trying to read him, as if he were a menu on a wall in a dimly lit bar. He was a specimen she had not seen before, and she wasn’t sure what to make of him. “Me too,” she said.
16
The Albany airport is small, and Wesley was hard to miss when he came down the concourse. Art and Ell Myers had a picture of him, taken at the facility in Phoenix, which Ell had printed from the Internet. Through their church they had answered a call for members to temporarily house displaced people from New Orleans. Their own two boys, grown up now, had long since moved out of their modest three-bedroom home, to different cities, and Ell thought it would be nice to have someone back in the empty nest for a little while.
Wesley emerged carrying a brand-new duffel bag with the price tag still on it, and wearing a cheap dark blue parka with fur trim around the hood, over a long T-shirt. He had no checked baggage. He turned a couple of heads because of the odd combination of clothes, and also because of his hyperalert quality, looking around like a cat in a cat carrier.
He didn’t know how to act, really, out in the world. SJ and, to some extent, Lucy had taught him manners—basics, like saying “please” and “thank you” and to take your hat off inside the house and things like that, but he had no real idea of how the parts fit together in the world beyond the Nine except what he had seen on television. In the Lower Nine if you made a misstep it could cost you your life, or part of your life in jail at least, and he assumed that the same was true everywhere.
Walking down the concourse now, as he had been directed, Wesley felt exposed and anxious, as if he were being processed for prison. He didn’t know where the people he was supposed to meet were going to be, or how long he was going to have to walk. It was hard to tell what information was important and what wasn’t important. He noticed one or two people looking at him but he was afraid to meet their gaze. Most ignored him completely; there were very few other black faces, and the few he saw didn’t really look to him like New Orleans folks.
He came out into a wider area and as he was trying to see which way he should go, an older white couple approached him, smiling, the woman holding a photo of him and saying, “Wesley…?”
“Yeah, that’s me,” Wesley said.
“Oh, you must be exhausted,” the woman said, opening her arms and hugging Wesley, who stood there rigidly, dutifully putting his free arm around the lady. He didn’t especially like being embraced by strangers, never had. This woman had thin gold-gray hair done in a permanent, and she was wearing a pink sweatshirt with a bunny appliquéd on the front. Her eyes bulged slightly.
“Welcome,” the man said, when the lady had let go of Wesley. The man put out his hand to shake and Wesley shook it. “Art Myers, and that’s Ell.”
“Which way we got to go to get out?” Wesley said, because that was what he was wondering.
Art Myers wasn’t quite sure what to say; a frown came into his manner, if not his face, at the rudeness of the question, the lack of manners. Ell stepped in and said, “We’re just parked right out here in the short-term lot. This isn’t a very big airport,” she said, smiling at the young man, who was looking around as if he expected to be shot at. “Do you need a hand with that bag?” she said, to Wesley but looking at Art. She knew her husband had been annoyed by the young man’s response. Art was a good and generous man, but he had rigid ideas about order and manners within the perimeter of his attention.
“No, I got it,” Wesley said.
They headed out into the parking lot. It was after rush hour; the sky was still light, although the sun was behind the houses and the hills. They walked without speaking. Wesley had no idea what he should or shouldn’t say, so he stayed quiet, and the Myers were in the same boat. Wesley recognized the surroundings as someone’s version of normal, but not his.
They left the airport and headed up the Northway. Wesley sat in the backseat, looking out silently at the ridge of silhouetted hills to the west. At one point he said, “Is that the Rocky Mountains?”
Art and Ell exchanged glances in the front seat, unsure if the young man were joking with them.
“Those are the Adirondacks,” the man said.
“Adirondacks,” Wesley repeated, watching the darkening shapes pass by the window.
That first night at dinner Art and Ell sat thinking variations on the same general thought as they watched the young man eat: What have we gotten ourselves into? The young man didn’t seem to know how to make normal conversation, although Ell was more ready to chalk it up to the undoubted trauma of the past week than was Art. They had fixed up their son Richard’s old room for him, cleared off the desk, just generally straightened up. Richard was in Savannah at an architectural firm and would certainly not be back before the holidays. Daniel, their younger boy, lived and worked in New Jersey, so they left his room open. There had been a predictable emptiness in their lives after the boys left, which Art filled with his woodworking and Ell filled with volunteer work at a soup kitchen in Troy, volunteer work at the Elba library, and keeping the house straight. She stayed in touch with relatives via the Internet.
Ell had prepared a pot roast with potatoes and carrots stewing in the juice. Although she expected the young man to be hungry, he ate sparingly, and he seemed to be examining each bite of food intently before eating it. Out of nervous politeness, they asked Wesley questions that received monosyllabic answers—about his house, whether he knew where his family was. The longest string of words he put together was, “Do you have any like Crystal sauce or anything to put on this?”
“Crystal sauce?” Ell said, leaning in slightly.
“Like hot sauce?”
“No…” she said. “Would you like some ketchup or some A-1?”
“No, that’s allright,” he said. He made note of her eyes again; it was the kind of face he might have made covert fun of under other circumstances.
“Crystal sauce,” she repeated. “Would I be able to find it in a store around here?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Af
ter dinner, Art went into the living room to read the newspaper. Ell said, “You must be tired; you can go to your room if you’d like, or we usually watch the TV in the living room. Just…make yourself at home. For whatever time you are here just act like this is your home.”
“Thank you,” he said. “When they said I could try and find my people?”
“Well, we can try first thing tomorrow I suppose. It’s probably a little late right now.”
“Can I try my mama phone again?”
“Of course,” Ell said. “Of course. There’s the telephone. You go ahead and make as many calls as you like.”
“Thank you,” he said. He knew to say thank you; Lucy had drilled that into him. If they went to get a snowball and he didn’t say thank you to the man, she would give him a swat on his bottom. Even if she was going off about something else, or drunk, if Wesley neglected to say thank you for something she would notice that. “Everybody like to hear thank you,” she said. “Everybody like to hear thank you and everybody like to hear their own name.” One time for one of his birthdays she had got him a red plastic fire engine, a small thing, but Wesley always liked fire engines, and he had gone and made a big sign for her, just said THANK YOU in red crayon and she had put it up on the refrigerator at the apartment off Jackson Avenue, and it stayed there for years. That was before they moved to Tennessee Street.
Wesley called Lucy’s cell number and SJ’s cell number and got “circuits are busy” messages on both of them, the same message he got when calling out on his own phone. He tried to think if there were any other number to call, but he assumed everyone else he knew in New Orleans was now in the same situation. He tried Chantrell’s phone and it was the same story.
He set the phone back down and stood in the dining room chewing on his lip, staring into the distance.
“No luck?” Ell said.
Wesley shook his head.
“We’ll find her tomorrow. Don’t worry; we’ll go down and get you registered. We’ll find your Mom.” She looked at the young man standing there in his sweatshirt, and he looked so lost to her that she went over and put her arms around him and gave him a hug. His body was rigid, stiff, as it had been at the airport.
“I guess maybe I’ll go to bed.”
“You do that,” she said. “Sleep as long as you want. If there’s anything you want in the night I’ll leave a light on and you can just come downstairs and help yourself.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Thanks,” he said, to Art.
“Okay,” Art said, letting the newspaper drop to half-mast. “You all set? Ell got you covered?”
“Yeah,” Wesley said. “I’m all set.”
Upstairs in the room Wesley prowled for a minute or two, looking at the pictures, the posters of unfamiliar faces. He sat on the bed. Then he was up and looking around again. There was a small framed photo of their son, he assumed it was their son, in a tuxedo with a girl in a gown, a prom picture. A small wooden bear, foreign coins in an ashtray, Boy Scout books. Wesley looked out the window into the backyard, which was dimly illuminated by the light from the house’s windows. His heart was racing; anxiety was like a constant noise in the room with him. It was harder being here, in this place, with all the evidence of life continuity, in all its foreignness, than it was being in the shelter. In a time of total disruption, disruption was what felt natural. This sense of continuity was what was hard to assimilate. He fought down in himself an overwhelming impulse to bolt, but he knew, he knew, that that was crazy. There was nowhere to go.
He lay down on the single bed with its nubby white bedspread. He did not take off his clothes, not even his shoes, and he left the lights on. All he wanted was to find his family and be out of there in a day or two. He lay there, looking at the ceiling. Within a minute he was asleep.
He woke up all at once, looking around, inside a dream, everything inverted, you wake up out of a dream, not into one, but now he knew where he was. He was in someone else’s life. He sat up on the side of the bed, listened hard. The clock on the nightstand said 7:20; the window curtains were light.
Wesley stood up, walked as quietly as he could to the closed door of the room and listened to hear whether anyone else was up. He couldn’t hear anyone moving around, no noise from the street, no cars. After some deliberation he opened the bedroom door as quietly as he could and stepped out.
He found Ell in the kitchen, slicing something at the drain board. She turned when he came into the room, wiped her hands on her apron and said, “Well, how did you sleep? Were you able to sleep?”
“I slept all right,” he said.
“Was the bed comfortable?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Bless your heart,” Ell said. “You sit right down here and let me pour you some orange juice.”
Outside the window above the sink, the early sun blazed off the rear of a house across the backyard. The kitchen itself had well-used fixtures, a slightly antique stove and refrigerator, but everything was scrupulously clean. There were pictures on the refrigerator, just like at SJ’s house.
“That’s our son Richard there, with our daughter-in-law, Donna.” Ell set a glass of juice down in front of Wesley. “That one over there is our grandson Michael and his sister Caitlin.”
Wesley drank the juice. The question of whether his mother and uncle were alive rose around him, like hot quicksand. He felt stifled, hot, and his pulse was racing. Ell kept up a running monologue as she fried eggs for him, about her grandson and her nieces and nephews, about their son Richard whose room he had slept in. Periodically she would ask him questions about his own life, to which he would respond with functional, unadorned answers.
“Daniel is more artistic,” she was saying. “I think he was so glad to get out of the house and stretch his wings. Art can be a pretty tough customer sometimes. He’s got a heart of gold, but sometimes he makes me so mad that I could almost brain him. Do you like jam on your toast, Wesley?”
“Yes please.”
“Art always had a more relaxed relationship with Richard, I guess. He just dotes on Michael and Caitlin. And they love their Paw-Paw. Do you have brothers and sisters, Wesley?”
“No,” he said. He attacked the food as if he were starving.
Ell knew that the young man couldn’t be interested in what she was saying, but she feared the dread-filled silence that would descend if she stopped talking. She switched tracks for a while, mused about how long New Orleans would take to rebuild. “I just can’t understand why it took the government so long to get in there and help those poor people. There is something wrong in this country when people have to live like that,” and she went on for a while in that vein, aware that the unanswering young man in front of her was one of the people she was talking about, until finally, defeated, she said, “Art always says I talk too much, and I’m probably doing that now.”
“No,” Wesley said. He had finished eating and, cornered now, he looked across the table at the woman who had taken him in. Above the shoulders of this morning’s embroidered sweatshirt, with its red script letters that read GRANDMA, the golden highlights in her thinning and gamely permed gray hair caught the light from the window over the sink. Her cheeks were slightly puffy under her eyes, and the makeup she had applied too heavily to the wrinkles along the corners of her mouth and edges of her chin had begun to flake off, exposing minuscule pink ravines. The eyes, which he had noticed the night before, still bulged slightly, as if she were being squeezed around her midsection by a giant, invisible hand. On first glance it had given her a cartoonish aspect in Wesley’s mind, but sitting there now he recognized something else in them, hard to pin down, which he had previously seen only in his own mother’s eyes, a look that he had no name for, a sympathy that bypassed any shell he had managed to construct. He feared that connection, even as he desired it. In any case it lasted only a moment, and then plates and glasses were cleared, and they made ready to head out into the day. Their first, brief, stop would be the Lutheran
Church where Art and Ell had registered for the program that sent them Wesley.
The church office, ten minutes’ drive away, was lit by gray fluorescent ceiling lamps and furnished with beat-up wooden salvage furniture that sat on bare, ancient green linoleum tile. One of the women there took down all of Wesley’s information—home address, names of his relatives, his social security number—and loaded it into one of the national information-sharing databases that they, like thousands of others around the country, had been trained to set up to process the tens of thousands of evacuees who had been separated from their families.
Wesley sat on a gray metal chair with a green vinyl seat, next to the desk, watching every move the lady made, his knee jiggling up and down. He asked when he might hear something, and the lady who had taken his information said, “The information is in the system right now. Once it’s in the computer, it will match up with any of the names you’re looking for as soon as your people are registered. We have Mrs. Myers’s contact information and we will be in touch as soon as we have anything to go on.”
“When that could be?”
“Well,” the lady said, raising her eyebrows and pursing her lips, “let’s have a look right now.”
The woman peered into her computer monitor, scrolling down. Ell took Wesley’s arm and rubbed it vigorously once or twice, encouragingly. After a minute the woman said, “Well…it doesn’t look like we have any matches yet, but that doesn’t mean anything. They told us that they’ve been adding sometimes four or five hundred names to the rolls in an hour. So we will contact you as soon as we have any information at all. Promise,” she said, smiling at the young man.
As they walked out the door into the snappy fall air Wesley seemed slightly relieved. As they approached the car, he even said, “That’s your name? Myers?”
