City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  Along Carrollton Avenue on the way to Mid-City, Craig and Bobby watched the greasy brown horizontal high-water lines creep higher on the sides of buildings, block by block, as the ground got gradually lower. The lines marked where the water had finally become level with the surface of Lake Pontchartrain before beginning to be drained out. It was one thing to hear about it on television, but it was another to see it in 360 degrees, with nothing but silence and stillness to fill the space.

  The streets of Mid-City were full of debris, garbage coated with the toxic greasy mud from the floodwaters. Some of the streets had been cleared, some were still blocked with downed trees and parts of houses, waterlogged cars with smashed windows and trunks popped open. The smell was different in the air, sour, and with invisible clouds of instantly nauseating decay hanging in ambush. Craig and Bobby had once shared a house in the area, for a year after Craig moved to town. As Craig drove, he glanced at Bobby in the passenger seat. It was hard to tell what Bobby was thinking, even after years of knowing him. Same expression of faint surprise and almost amusement, but the eyes registered nothing.

  They pulled up in front of Bobby and Jen’s two-story wood-frame house off Orleans Avenue, not far from City Park. The house sat on brick piers, three feet off the ground, and a horizontal brown line ran across the thin weatherboards about three feet above where the floor was, with a greasy residue coating the boards below it, and two thinner, fainter secondary lines where the receding water had come to a temporary rest. Six feet of water had sat in the street for over a week.

  They made none of their customary jokes or asides as Craig followed Bobby up the steps. They had put on the disposable rubber boots Craig had picked up at Home Depot, and they carried medium-grade surgical masks and rubber gloves. As Bobby turned the key in the lock, Craig looked up and down the empty street at the garbage, ruined cars, dead trees, brown grass coated with muck…

  Door opened, and they stepped inside to the large living room, which was shadowy from plywood over three of the four windows. “Watch it,” Bobby said immediately; his foot had slid on the wooden floor, which was coated with a layer of slick scum. The smell of damp and mold was sickening. They both slid their surgical masks over their mouth and nose and got the rubber bands set in back of their heads.

  Once their eyes adjusted, the impression they both had was that someone had come in and ransacked the house. The couch was set at a crazy angle, and the television was facedown in the middle of the floor. They closed the door behind them. Two cheap bookcases had apparently come apart and leaned against mounds of sodden, soaked books. A shattered ceramic pot with a withered, drowned brown plant next to it.

  They walked in across the slick floor, tentatively. Three rugs that had once been brightly colored were now black; water squeezed up out of them with each step across. Bobby’s acoustic guitar lay on the floor; the back had come unglued and had warped away from the rest of the body like a potato chip. He bent to look; it was draped with grease or muck that hung off of it in translucent folds to the floor, which it also covered. One wooden chair on its side, the same. The sound system had not moved from its low shelf near the passage into the kitchen, but on examination it was covered with a film of the same stuff. Everything, in fact, had been draped with the greasy muck, which had been floating on top of the water as it set. From the evidence on the walls, the water had indeed reached about the three-foot level, and then gradually went down like the water in a slow-draining bathtub.

  “Look at this,” Craig said. Bobby came to look; an antique table that had belonged to Bobby’s grandfather had been stripped of varnish below the waterline, although the varnish had been left intact above it. “What was in this shit?” he said, looking around.

  The news reports had been full of dire speculation about the contents of the water, since chemical spills, battery acid, human remains, raw sewage, dead animals, and countless other ingredients had spilled into it without a doubt. Craig and Bobby both put on the rubber gloves. Bobby had squatted down and lifted up a corner of a small oriental rug; Craig remembered Jen talking about her mother giving her that rug specifically before she died of cancer; it had been one of the few times Craig remembered her letting her emotions show without some kind of deflective humor. The goo came up with it like cheese on a pizza slice, and liquid dripped from it.

  “This is toast,” Bobby said.

  “What do you want to do with it?” Craig said, through the mask.

  “I don’t know,” Bobby said. He looked around, still squatting.

  Mold, green and black spots of different sizes, had bloomed tentatively on the walls below the waterline and, in a couple of cases, above it as well. A few posters that hung high on the walls were apparently all right. They went into the kitchen, where the floor was littered with sodden boxes and cans. Bobby opened a cabinet containing cereal boxes covered with fuzzy mold, rusted pots and skillets…He opened the oven door and water spilled out on his boots, along with an unendurable stench. Making the same mistake he had failed to warn Craig about earlier, he opened the freezer before he thought; a package of once-frozen bacon was now a pullulating mass of maggots. He shut it again, quickly.

  In the dining room, Bobby’s Les Paul guitar seemed all right at first glance on its stand, for some reason it had stayed put, but on closer examination the strings and pickups were full of corrosion and the leather strap was coated with fuzzy green mold.

  The heat was amazing, and the masks got irritating with sweat and Craig slipped his off for a moment until he took a breath of the air without the mask, then he slipped it back on again. They walked upstairs, and, miraculously, the upstairs rooms were unharmed, except for the rear one, where a tree had fallen and broken a window and some glass had smashed on the floor and some books in a case under the window had gotten wet.

  It was more than the mind could take in. Every house on that block and the next and every other block for miles in each direction contained some version of this scene, marinating in the murderous heat. Craig felt a gaping pain for his friend, who walked next to him surveying the wreckage of the life he had led. What could he say to help? He was there with Bobby; they would do some work, but what was there to say? He also noticed in himself an unmistakable feeling of guilt. He and Alice had been spared this scene.

  Back downstairs, as Bobby examined something in a corner, Craig leaned against a wall, allowing his mind to coast for a minute or two, staring at Bobby’s poster of Professor Longhair, playing piano in the yard of the parish prison, a famous image, hanging on the wall above the waterline in the dining room. Suddenly it occurred to him consciously that the poster was intact. Professor Longhair was all right; this was a good omen…

  “Hey,” Craig said. He looked around for Bobby, who was still crouched in the corner, looking at something he had picked up. “Hey, your poster is good to go, man. Check it out.” A moment or two. “You okay?”

  He walked across the room to where his friend was.

  “You okay?”

  Bobby was holding something in his hands, crouching and staring at what looked to Craig like a limp, browned slice of sautéed eggplant. Craig leaned slightly to put his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

  Without looking up, Bobby said, “My mom’s gloves, from her wedding.”

  Bobby stayed in a crouch, looking at his mother’s gloves, and Craig stood with his hand on Bobby’s shoulder. Bobby’s mom had cooked the first Thanksgiving meal Craig had eaten in New Orleans. A large, sunny woman whose working-class family went back generations in the city; she liked to laugh and to cook, and she adored Bobby and she had died a long, horrible death from emphysema and diabetes, four years before. Craig noticed a filigreed picture frame on the floor, facedown. He stayed there with his hand on his friend’s shoulder, feeling the slow rise and fall of his friend’s breathing. It was the best he could do.

  They spoke very little on the ride out of town. As they left Bobby’s house they had been stopped by four members of the 82nd Airb
orne patrolling the streets in a Jeep. The soldiers asked them for identification and to state their business. Bobby and Craig ended up having a cordial three-minute conversation with the young men, none of whom had ever been to New Orleans before. But after thanking the soldiers and heading out, they got quiet. Some strange discomfort had entered the car, as if they had seen something shameful and were embarrassed to look at each other. What was that, Craig wondered? Where could shame have possibly entered the picture?

  As he drove, Craig realized that, for the first time in his life, he was happy to be leaving New Orleans. He was aware, to his surprise, of a voice inside himself saying, “Get me out of here.” Some unlicensed neural channel was broadcasting subversive propaganda, insisting that New Orleans, as he knew it, was over with. “Much as you love it, New Orleans is not your whole life. You can get away; you have the resources. Save yourself and your family.”

  Craig was astonished and repelled by this reflexive, seemingly autonomous, and nearly overwhelming voice. Leaving New Orleans was, in fact, an option for Craig. He had lived for many years before moving there. But New Orleans was Bobby’s entire life. The streets they drove, the corner stores they passed, the churches and schools, all of it carried echoes for Bobby of childhood adventures, playground fights, first Communion, early girlfriends, funerals of grandparents, holiday dinners…If New Orleans had been an exoskeleton for Craig, which conferred meaning from outside, for Bobby it was his very bone structure. It wasn’t a refuge; it was life itself, from the inside out. And that difference, which, under normal circumstances, created a nice tension, a fruitful source of mutual stimulation and interest, had settled into the car and was the source of the embarrassment he was feeling. The fact was that Craig could, in principle, walk away, but Bobby couldn’t leave. It was like driving with a condemned man.

  Bobby gave no evidence of those feelings, nor of much else. Craig wondered how he felt, but to ask him questions about it would only underline the fact that they were having very different experiences. In New Orleans, the one place where Craig had come to feel like an insider, he was suddenly an outsider.

  Or was he? If he shifted positions in his mind just a bit, reminded himself that he owned a house, that they were raising children there, and that they had a stake in the city even if they didn’t go back generations, Craig could bring himself back up in the mix enough to take a deep breath and feel his own sorrow, his own shock and anger, and his own set of questions about the future. Yet even as he rehearsed these steps, the other voice slithered in again, saying, “You need to establish an alternate plan.”

  He would not be able to speak about this with Alice. Such thoughts were her end of the tug-of-war, and if he began to slacken his hold on the other end, the game would be over with. He wasn’t ready for that, and he would need to sort it out. But the thoughts would not leave him alone all the way back to Baton Rouge.

  20

  They were some long days, in Texas.

  Breakfast at the table in the kitchen; one end of the table up against the paneled wall, under a travel poster for Jamaica, picturing a sand beach stretching off into the distance. “I like looking at that,” Aaron said. “We ought to all go down there for a break, maybe January.”

  If SJ agreed or disagreed, there was no way to tell. Dot set a plate of eggs and country ham down in front of him. The only thing that could get SJ to smile or focus much was when Ali, their Pomeranian, would come into the room, with its bulging eyes and bodacious attitude. The dog would get on her hind legs and put two paws on SJ’s thigh and stare at him, and if SJ didn’t acknowledge her she would let out a sharp yap at regular intervals until he did. When Aaron and Dot were off to work at the post office SJ would often hang out with Ali on the couch. SJ couldn’t seem to focus on a book; he tried a few times, but he couldn’t concentrate. But he could talk to Ali for a long time.

  “Where’s your mama?” SJ would say. Ali’s head would cock to one side, staring at SJ on high alert, as if he were transmitting important messages. “Where she, Ali?” Ali would snort and shake her head a little, maintaining that eye contact. “You talking, Ali? You trying to talk with me?” No response, just holding SJ’s gaze, until SJ’s attention would get distracted by something, maybe the TV, and he would look away for a moment and Ali would issue a quick bark to draw SJ’s attention back to the important business at hand. At those times SJ would smile and might even chuckle slightly. Eventually SJ would get caught up watching the TV and Ali would curl up next to him and go to sleep and SJ would go to sleep, too.

  Hammer, drill, sander, saw…his tools were phantom limbs. SJ would sometimes wake up almost physically hungry for his tools, for his truck. But even if he had them, what would he do with them? What would he work on? And why? As the long days and weeks went by, there seemed no answer to that question. Aaron’s house was all of twelve years old and needed no work. The whole subdivision could have been dropped down by a spaceship for all it had the character that SJ was used to, and used to caring for.

  There was work if SJ wanted it, or needed it. Aaron had a friend with a carpentry and construction business something like SJ’s own, and he could have used SJ’s expertise “in a New York minute,” as Aaron said. But SJ wasn’t ready to go to work on a small team of people he didn’t know, in a place he didn’t care about. And even the possibility that he could begin to care about any of it was something to be avoided. He was in no way ready to have a stake in some other place not his own, meeting the new people, explaining why he didn’t go out to the bars…He wasn’t ready at age fifty-seven to start thinking of himself as a Texan. It would have been like turning away from his father and his grandfather and the houses they had built, Claiborne Avenue, memories of Camille as a girl, cookouts on the neutral ground, the Mardi Gras Indians, Mr. Doucette and Mr. Broussard and Ronald Riley and Bobby Encalarde and Sister Neeta and Charmaine Thomas and St. Claude Avenue, the Second Lines up on Galvez, sitting with Bootsy out on the porch, Rosetta. But it was all gone anyway, the houses they had built gone, Bootsy gone, Sister Neeta gone, breathed in all that water with her head knocking on the wood beams in her attic, her feet all wet…Thrown away like garbage, floating like garbage for the animals to eat, what did it matter where he was if that was all gone? And if it didn’t matter where he was, then what did it matter if he was anywhere? What was the point in living if it didn’t matter where he was? If there were something left to build on…but how could there be? It was all gone. And he would never be a Texan…There was no point.

  “SJ,” Dot said, taking his plate, “looking toward the future isn’t giving up. You can’t live in the past. Not looking into the future is giving up.”

  “Where’s the future?” SJ said.

  “I don’t know the answer to that, SJ. But I do know that flood was God’s will. Nothing happen without it have a reason. You have to live so God can use you.”

  “That flood was not God’s will,” SJ said, anger flaring up in him with startling and frightening speed, as if he were talking to a stranger who had threatened him. “How can you tell me that was God’s will? That flood was somebody’s mistake. The hurricane was God’s will, if you want to see it like that, but that flood was man’s mistake.” His veins, tensed, muscles, in his mind, it ran out of control: God has a goddamn plan? What kind of plan involved a three-hundred-pound paraplegic drowning in her own attic in motor oil and human shit? Where’s the motherfucking plan in that? People seventy years old been together their whole life, owned the house, holding hands while they die? Where’s the fucking plan? “They going to find out. Some motherfucker didn’t do his goddamn job.”

  “Samuel.” Dot said, sternly. “Please.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But they will find out. And what man has broken, man can fix.”

  “It don’t look like nothing left there to fix, SJ.”

  SJ stood up from the table, shaking his head. But what if it was so? All the streets he ran on as a boy, as a young man, he lived on as an
adult, had bodies of his friends and neighbors floating in them. They were finding bodies all over. Sometimes it was too much for him and he would not talk for an entire day at a time. The stress sometimes triggered other memories and feelings and responses that felt almost physical to him, things he had known for a long time, from after his time in the army, and he would sometimes lie on his back at night in bed practicing breathing, thinking about Rosetta, thinking about good times he could remember, but every thought of a good time stabbed like a knife that said, gone, gone, gone…

  On the phone one day with Camille. Camille had made a good life, with two sons, in Raleigh-Durham; her husband was a good man with whom SJ had not much in common, but he was good to Camille; SJ and Rosetta had raised their only child to know the difference between fool’s gold and real gold, to look for a man who respected her. They had a beautiful new house there; their boys were in Catholic school, well behaved and bright.

  “Daddy, you know what Mama would have said. ‘You got to get in that church.’”

  SJ standing in Aaron’s living room, looking out over his driveway at the house across the street, somebody’s child riding a tricycle past, a beautiful, sunny day and him inside with no lights on. They had all gone to church until Camille had made her confirmation and SJ even kept on after Rosetta had died and he lost his own faith, until Camille had graduated high school and went off to college. All those streets, those neighborhoods, the stores, the people…how did the entire population of your life disappear? Anyone he thought of from those days he thought of in wet clothes wondering where help was, wheelchair-bound, taking water in their mouth. He knew he had to control it and sometimes he could and sometimes he couldn’t. Why the mouth, he thought? Why was it always the water at the corners of their mouth, and what was the last thing they saw.

  “Daddy, may I speak with Aaron for a minute?” SJ handed the cordless phone to his cousin, who stepped outside with it onto the back patio.