City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  “No,” Alice said, looking around.

  “The ad didn’t say it?” the woman said, puzzled.

  “You know,” Alice said, “maybe it did. I’ve looked at so many ads…” In the corner between the two windowed walls was a fireplace, and facing, two couches at right angles, cozy, a perfect area for reading.

  They walked through the apartment and Alice knew that this was where she wanted to live. At the end of the visit Alice said this to Grace and asked if she would be able to give her a couple of days to talk to Craig about it. The woman agreed, saying that the first of the month was a ways off, and Alice drove back to Gus and Jean’s with an unreasoning feeling of joy and possibility inside.

  Illinois was a long, flat fact, Interstate 57 a thin scar down its midsection, eventually joining I-55 just across the river from Cairo, Illinois, around Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Craig, in the van, was a moving dot, making his way south, a dot within the moving dot of the car, with tense shoulders and a grim expression on its face as he listened to the radio in the endless afternoon:

  Now, see, Bobby, what I’m saying is what’s interesting is the people complaining about the government are the same ones that’s been living off the government. “You didn’t come fast enough, you didn’t take care of us.” The government’s been taking care of them and giving them no-work jobs and doing everything but wiping their nose and someplace else, too, and now after the government tells ’em get out, we got shelters, they just sit there and cry when what the government says is gonna happen happens.

  And help themselves to some free loot.

  That’s right. But you don’t see that on the CNN. All you see is these women with fifteen kids that they feed off a government check in the first place, crying about how the government won’t support their [BEEP]. None of ’em look like they been going hungry too much either.

  There was a good line that Nelson Rockefeller, if you remember Nelson Rockefeller was governor of New York State some years back…

  And…and…Bobby…he wasn’t any kind of a Republican either…

  He was campaigning and one of these big Welfare Gourmets stood up, she was pretty big, you know, and she said, “Mistuh Rockafellow, you don’t know what it is to be hungry.” And Rockefeller said, “Madam, from the looks of things neither do you.”

  He said that?

  He sure did, and it effectively ended his career. The liberals didn’t want to hear that. Mr. Steve, we’re going to go on to the next caller here.

  Allright, Bobby, but one more thing that Rockefeller quote shows. Nobody’s all bad.

  Except Hillary Clinton. [Laughter.] Next caller, Michelle from Greensboro, Get Wise.

  Bobby?

  Yep; you’re on the air, Michelle.

  I just wanted to say about what that last caller said about people having babies and feeding them off the government checks?

  Yeah.

  Why isn’t the president doing more to stop that kind of thing?

  Michelle, I think he wants to, but this country isn’t a dictatorship, thank God. If it were a dictatorship Bill and Hillary would still be sitting up there on a throne in the White House and you and I would be paying to have Willie Jackson’s Cadillac souped up, or gold teeth put on his grandchildren. The president has to go through the Congress, and they are worried about getting reelected. Right now we have a media that is completely controlled by the liberals…

  Craig reached for the knob and punched it angrily, catapulting himself into solitude and road hum, his heart pumping pure anger. He shook his head, opened the window. No more, he thought. He had turned the radio on to get away from the constant scenarios and questions his mind was generating about what he would find in New Orleans. What would he do if the house was wrecked? The entire city had been emptied; what would that look like? Should he have brought a gun? What was he going to do with a gun? The Gumbo offices were in Mid-City, and they knew Mid-City had flooded. Was New Orleans still New Orleans if the houses had been flattened and the oak trees blown down and there were corpses floating in the canals?

  It took Craig six hours to get to Cairo, where a tangle of construction detours added half an hour onto the process of getting across the Mississippi River to Missouri. This was hilly country now, a nice change of pace from Illinois’ nearly unrelieved flatness. He picked up I-55 and took it down through the Missouri Bootheel and into Arkansas as the sky slowly lost its light. What, he wondered, did New Orleans look like right at this moment? Was anyone walking down Cypress Street, looking stunned and crazy? Were there soldiers? Was there anything?

  Moving back home had been a topic he and Alice had tacitly avoided in the past two weeks. He couldn’t know the true dimensions of the question until he had seen the city himself, gotten a feel for what they were up against, what it would take. Some of that would only be answered with time, too—the fate of Gumbo, of Boucher, of their friends…He knew that he wanted his house, his food cooked in his kitchen, their kitchen, with their friends. One of the hardest things was talking every day to people who had no idea what it was like, who thought normal was…normal. It had felt so refreshing to speak to the evacuees. But who knew who he would speak to in New Orleans? At least Bobby would be with him.

  He crossed the bridge into Memphis around eight-thirty and fought an impulse to stop and get barbecue, which would have used up at least half an hour. Instead, he stopped at a McDonald’s drive-through south of the city. Around Batesville he found himself getting too tired to go on—it had been a long day of driving but also long emotionally, and he pulled into a motel and settled in for the night. After he got undressed he called back to Elkton to talk to Alice and to say goodnight to Annie and Malcolm.

  Alice had planned not to say anything that night to Craig about the apartment she had looked at that afternoon, but she was so excited she couldn’t help it. After Craig told her about the drive and spoke to the kids, Alice got on and told him about the house, about how nice the landlady was, how warm and comfortable the apartment was, and furnished, too, and there were books everywhere, and a fireplace and close to the Montessori school. “I know you’re thinking about a lot of other things,” she said, “but I can’t wait for you to see it.”

  Craig, sitting on the bed in the motel room, found himself almost breathless with anger. Here he was on his way back to New Orleans to see what, if anything, was left of the life they had been living—their life, he thought, not a fantasy; the one they had been living—with friends, and a school already there, and a culture they had been part of—and to hear Alice so excited about beginning a new life in Elkton was so jarring he didn’t even know how to express it. He imagined all her class anxieties being played on by the iconography of this place; this, she thinks, is the ticket to the white middle-class dream she has been looking to live out. Even if she couldn’t wait to get out of New Orleans, what about his feelings?

  He stammered out some version of all this, trying to keep his voice even but almost blind with rage. “We already have a life, Alice,” he said, feeling vaguely nauseated. “I can’t think about starting another life someplace. I’m in the middle of the life I’m living; I don’t know what life you think you’re living. This is a fantasy. Books and a fireplace…I need everything I have just to get through the next few days and I just can’t believe you are saying this…”

  “This is a fantasy?” Alice said, in disbelief. “You want to know a fantasy? Right now going back to New Orleans is a fantasy. Nobody even knows if anybody’s going to be able to live there. We’re going to be in Chicago for at least the rest of the fall and probably the rest of the school year. What do you want to do—stay up in Gus and Jean’s attic for six months?”

  This logic was unassailable, but the logic wasn’t what was really bothering him. It was what he picked up underneath the logic—the unshared thing, the agenda, or put better, the bald fact that they were not going through this with one purpose. He felt betrayed and sick; the closeness he had felt that morning had now disa
ppeared, and here he was sitting in the middle of Mississippi in this motel room, on his way into God knew what…

  They got off the phone with no good resolution to the conversation, both hurt, both anxious and far away from home. When the cell phone was folded up and silent, Craig stood and paced back and forth a few times, looked outside the room door and thought about pacing outside, decided not to, closed the door and stood with his hand against the wall, leaning, looking at the rug. For the first time, standing there, he had a feeling that they might not make it through this. It wasn’t just that they wanted different things; it was that the things they wanted had accrued such symbolic force for each of them that it was hard to see any way of reconciling them. Where was the loyalty to New Orleans, and to the life they had bought into together, he thought? He was not going to be a suburban squire in Chicago while the city he loved sank. The last thing in the world he wanted was to give Annie a broken home. But would a broken parent be better for her?

  After a long while, Craig got into bed and turned out the lights and lay staring into the space above his head. It was a long night in Batesville, and it was a long night in Elkton, while in the countryside and the streets around them people spun out their own lives, with who knew what kinds of interruptions, losses and sadnesses.

  19

  Silence.

  Parking lots baking in the sun. Long avenues and short side streets.

  Shaded, broken sidewalks. Buckled porches. Winding bayou placid and empty except for twisted dead helicopter.

  Traffic light boxes silent at empty corners. Telephone wires, birdless; air humid and undisturbed.

  Three weeks after the storm, the city empty. Where water had been, now unmatched sneakers, rags, branches, tires, flotsam come to random rest. Cars empty, trunks popped open, windows broken out, striated with muck left to dry as flood water slowly drained. Motorboat at rest on broken glass storefront sidewalk.

  No bird; no insect. No sound, no radio, no passing car, no car waiting at intersection. Sun, empty, silence.

  They had started toward New Orleans from Baton Rouge that morning before sunup. It had been an emotional reunion the night before, when Craig arrived at Pam and Mike’s, where Bobby and Jen were staying. The usual joking and deflective parrying was replaced with serious eye-to-eye looks and gratitude at seeing one another, alive. Bobby had developed a small rash on his cheek by the corner of his mouth, and his eyes were red around the rims. Jen was subdued, a little stunned seeming. Pam and Mike prepared a Mexican dinner that night, and they talked about the past three weeks. Bobby and Jen had seen Doug and Connie, who were both now in Hammond, an hour away. Doug had reported that aside from wind damage, things seemed more or less stable in Craig’s neighborhood.

  Mid-City, where Bobby and Jen lived, had flooded. “It’s hard to tell where the water is, and how deep it is,” Bobby said. “I think where my mom’s house was they had about ten feet. It used to flood if there was an afternoon rain.”

  “What about yours?” Craig said.

  “Don’t know. Can’t tell. Could be two feet, could be ten.”

  “We got the second floor, though,” Jen said. Then, an afterthought: “We don’t know if we have a roof or not, but we have a second floor.”

  It was a Jen-ish remark, but delivered in a more muted tone than usual. Craig found himself, as he listened, taking mental notes—like that “could be two feet, could be ten”—for use in the article he would write. The columns were a godsend, he thought; they gave him a way to process and manage all this potentially overwhelming material.

  The next morning they headed out from Baton Rouge on the nearly empty interstate. The press credentials got them easily past a checkpoint at Laplace. As they got closer in toward the city, they gaped at the wrecked suburbs of Kenner and Metairie, silent, roofs covered with blue tarpaulins, streets impassable, branches, tree trunks, splintered wood and pieces of roof everywhere…

  They took the familiar exit for Causeway and headed south toward the river, alone on the four-lane road. A traffic light had blown off its wire and sat upside down in the middle of its intersection. From a smashed storefront across the way a motorboat protruded like a fish in a bird’s mouth. A billboard bent over backward, and next to it a storage facility with its side ripped off, furniture inside spilling out as if from a ruined dollhouse.

  They had decided to go to Craig’s house first, since the neighborhood hadn’t flooded. Apricot Street was an obstacle course of downed tree limbs and electric lines hanging down like thin, deadly snakes. All the houses had fluorescent orange and green spray-painted markings left by search teams to indicate the day they had passed, and whether bodies had been found, of humans or of animals. They made the corner onto Cypress Street, Craig’s block, and parked.

  Withering heat in the oak tree shade. One tree had blown down and blocked the street three houses down; as it fell the roots had torn up the sidewalk. Craig approached the front door of his house, with Bobby, looking up and down the deserted block.

  The air inside was as still as a tomb, suffocatingly hot and foul smelling. Everything was exactly as they had left it two weeks earlier. One of Annie’s toys on the picnic table where they ate, the television, the stacks of kids’ videos next to it, a copy of Charlotte’s Web sitting in the middle of the sofa, sheet music open on the piano. Craig had the sensation of having entered the house of a person who had died suddenly.

  In the laundry area in back of the kitchen, a fresh stack of towels and underwear on top of the washing machine. Craig opened the refrigerator before he thought about it, and he slammed it shut immediately and retched, briefly, in the sink.

  “Sorry,” Bobby said. “I should have reminded you not to do that.”

  “We have to get that outside,” Craig said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

  “You can’t just set that out,” Bobby said.

  “We can duct tape it or something,” Craig said. “I’ve got some somewhere. I want to look upstairs.”

  The second floor was untouched, like the first floor, and even hotter. Only the rear room, which Craig had used as an office before it got turned into a storage room for boxes of books, had suffered any damage at all—a broken window had let in some rain, and there were some streaks and a couple of spots of black mold that had taken advantage of the heat and moisture to grow, and likewise some green mold on the ceiling around a brown ring that showed where water must have entered through some missing roof shingles. But there wasn’t much, and before they left Craig would get some spray cleaner with bleach out of his car and wet it down.

  Craig spent most of half an hour retrieving the items on Annie’s list, some things Alice had asked for, and some important books, financial records, photographs and papers. Everything else he left, reasoning that their possessions were likely as safe there as they would have been anyplace. He found the duct tape and with Bobby’s help wrapped tape around the refrigerator several times to make sure that both compartments stayed closed, then they dragged it out Craig’s back door, thumping down his rear three steps and out to the curb on Apricot Street. A quick walk-around revealed one broken windowpane high up on the Apricot Street side, the one that had let the water into his office, and some of the missing roof shingles, too. Aside from scattered debris here and there, that was it for visible damage on his property. After that they sat on the front steps and drank some water from the skid of bottles Craig brought along.

  In his mind, after the initial shock of the deadness of the neighborhood and the stillness and eeriness of the house’s interior had subsided slightly, Craig let himself be grateful; he knew they had been very lucky. The neighborhood, despite the wind damage, seemed intact. But even though he knew this, Craig’s emotions skittered like ants through his veins; his mind and heart were trying in a panic to regain a sense of reality. They were in New Orleans, but it wasn’t New Orleans. It was like seeing someone for the first time after they had had a lobotomy. It was not something that happened, to see a w
hole city deserted like this, as if after some apocalyptic battle. You couldn’t get the weirdness just from watching the television. The shock of streets that had been vibrant with life, houses, all empty. What had happened here?

  He wanted to call Alice and he didn’t want to call her. They had spoken only briefly the day before, en route to Craig’s brief conversations with Annie and Malcolm. Annie asked if he were in New Orleans yet, so he explained again about the timing of the trip.

  “When can I come down with you?” she asked.

  “Let’s talk about that,” he had said. “I want to make sure it’s safe before I bring you down.”

  “I made an angel in art class today; they had cell-o-phane and we made wings out of wires and cellophane.”

  “That’s great, sweetie.”

  “I miss you.”

  He missed her, too, and the feeling clutched at him in the cold space around his businesslike exchanges with Alice. Neither of them, apparently, was in the mood for a peacemaking gesture after the previous night’s conversation, a stance which they both knew could lead to deeper problems, yet neither of them made the first step. This, he thought, is how the battle lines get drawn. He needed an extra degree of understanding from her during this visit, especially, and he would not easily forgive her leaving him to experience this grief and weirdness by himself.

  Could he imagine a life there without her, which also meant without the children? The pain was more than he wanted to try to process on top of everything else at that moment. But neither did he want to imagine moving to Chicago and leaving behind the city that had expressed everything he’d always wanted to express himself, in its time of need, and picking up a comfortable upper-middle-class life among people who’d had no idea what they had been through. The ants skittered in his mind and his veins…