City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  “Is that so?” she said, unsmiling, don’t-carefied, looking into his eyes not a foot from his face, a coolly appraising look, a cat regarding a trapped mouse, eyebrow arched now in mock hauteur and disregard. “I believe I can take anything you can dish out, Mister Stuff. I don’t know if you can take it.”

  SJ gave one grunting, grudged, half-laugh at this and brought one of his hands up behind her head and brought her face down to his, saying, “Let’s see about that.”

  Afterward, after they had both taken showers and lounged around some, SJ wanted to speak to Leeshawn, to tell her that he was in no way sure what could be possible, that he couldn’t know where this storm would finally leave him, but she stopped him even before he could speak.

  “You don’t need to say a thing, SJ. I’m not expecting anything from you. And I got my own questions I deal with, so don’t worry about I can’t handle it or anything like that. Let me tell you something,” she said, sitting next to him and putting her hand on his chest. “You gave me a gift today. We both got a gift. I’m grateful for that gift, do you understand what I’m saying? It is a blessing just to be in the world, and sometimes we forget we’re in the world. You understand what I’m saying, Samuel?”

  She hadn’t called him Samuel before. “I wanted to make sure,” he said.

  She nodded, not smiling, looking into his eyes. “You also need to make sure for yourself,” she said. “Don’t worry too much about me. You’ve been through a lot and I’m not talking about just this hurricane. All I’m trying to say is you need to figure out what you need for your own sake, not for mine. I’m not a schoolgirl anymore, SJ.”

  SJ wanted to say that he understood, but saying it would somehow have undercut the very thing he wanted to say. And anyway what he wanted to say was more than just that he understood. He wanted to say that he was grateful for this understanding, and for her strength and clear-sightedness.

  “I can see that,” he said.

  “Mmm-hmm,” she said, tartly, regarding him as she stood up and finished getting dressed. “We’ll see.”

  21

  SJ looked at his shirt, felt it between his fingers, like a phrase in a foreign language out of which he could understand only a few words. The grammar manifest, yet inscrutable. The bedspread at Aaron and Dot’s a presence, again; he ran his hand over it, mystified, like an amnesiac. Water, in the sink, his own torso, the feel of the razor as he shaved. You remember this. Don’t you, SJ? Yes you do. This was called life, this call-and-response of senses to mind and back again…The tactile, the way things fit together and spoke to one another physically. Or at least, for starters, the sense that they did, that the relations comprised a language. Food in the mouth, sun on the skin, air in the open car window (driving to Sun Village Mall, for example, to buy linens with Leeshawn). Or simply the grain of wood, the density, the language of pine, of oak, of cypress. The door, the molding, the varnish, the paint. There it was; there he was.

  One day he saw something he had seen every day for a month and a half, a loose hinge on the closet door. He went downstairs to Aaron’s utility room, rummaged around and found a Phillips head screwdriver and an assortment of screws and simply replaced the screw that was in the hinge with a larger one. That would hold it until he could really fix the hinge.

  This was how you came back, if you came back. One thread at a time, one nail at a time. Make each one good and the pattern would reveal itself.

  By early October there were over 150,000 displaced New Orleanians in the greater Houston area. Two hundred thousand more landed all over the country, like unsorted nails in a toolbox, like clothes thrown into a bag quickly, to be sorted later. Many migrated an hour upriver to Baton Rouge, where the housing prices doubled within three months. They landed in Atlanta and Dallas and Memphis, in Chicago and Little Rock and Hot Springs and Phoenix. But the largest concentration was in Houston.

  It took a while for people from a given neighborhood to find one another, but little by little they did. Lucy found Jaynell, who had already started doing hair “New Orleans style” for some of the evacuees in the living room of her cousin’s house on the East Side, and Lucy was able to pick up a little extra money helping her out. New Orleanians ran into one another at the store, at the Home Depot, at malls. They gave each other news of neighbors, of family, shared information about troubles getting aid from FEMA, or from insurance. There was plenty of news about members of the community who did not make it through, and it wore on the mind and the heart. And at the times when they saw someone for the first time and knew that they had, in fact, made it through, there was a deep sense of gratitude, thanks offered to a God most of them still believed in and thanked for what they had, even as they wondered how to construct a future out of the fragments that were left.

  Across the country, the displaced citizens of New Orleans wondered why they couldn’t come back home. Those with resources were able to rent apartments in upscale areas of New Orleans at the inflated rates that landlords suddenly realized they could charge, or they bought one of the houses that suddenly hit the market in the twenty percent of the city that did not flood, sold by owners who suddenly realized that they could sell at fifty percent above the price they might have gotten six months earlier and move out of New Orleans.

  The people without those resources, who had just been hanging on in life as it was before the storm, who had to take three buses to work across the city and back from work every day and support aging parents and nieces and nephews of siblings or cousins in jail, or sick, ended up in far-flung places: Salt Lake City, Hot Springs, Memphis, Atlanta, and hundreds of temporary shelters in the countryside of America. They wanted to come home, and they waited and watched as the weeks, and then the months, stretched on.

  Huge tracts of the city sat without electricity. There was no water, and there was no gas. Even after gas service had been restored, water got into the gas lines and rendered them inoperable. A year later, there would still be no telephone service in large areas of the city. There were no traffic lights for months, even at major intersections. And in many cases there were no houses to come back to. Hundreds of displaced people ended up living under the Interstate 10 overpass along Claiborne Avenue in abandoned cars that had been flooded and which reeked of mildew. If you found a dry piece of cardboard and laid it down across the backseat you had a place to lie down at least. It smelled bad and you developed a cough, but you could say more or less the same thing about anyplace.

  To address this, the government ordered thousands of mobile-home trailers, universally called FEMA trailers after the agency in charge of providing them, which cost the government over fifty thousand dollars apiece. The move was announced with great fanfare and many of the displaced applied for the trailers, making their way through a jungle of recorded messages, inexperienced voices on the phone, contradictory information, inexplicable delays, duplication of effort. There was no coordination among the various agencies set up to provide aid. Insurance companies dragged out their response as long as possible, haggling over whether damage to peoples’ houses had come from the wind, which took their roof off, or the flood water, which sat in their house for a week and had been, ultimately, caused by the wind, so was ineligible for flood claims.

  The few trailers that did trickle into New Orleans (thousands more sat, inexplicably, like rounded-up cattle in pens in rolling fields in Alabama and Arkansas and Mississippi, where they still sat a year later), were dutifully installed in front yards and then left there, locked, since there was often no key. A year later, people who had long since resettled themselves elsewhere were getting calls telling them their FEMA trailer was ready.

  The repairs on the actual houses were another story. If you got your insurance money and had a house to repair, which meant you were one of the very lucky ones, the repairs were slow, tedious and unreliable at best. The contractors, not to mention the scattered members of their crews, had also been displaced and were struggling to get back to town to live in dam
aged houses, or commuting in from Baton Rouge or Laplace or even farther every day in brutally swollen traffic. They were overwhelmed with requests to do work that would have been too much even with full, experienced crews. Now they competed with one another for the few workers who were able to make it back.

  Some contractors rounded up illegal alien workers, many of them young men from Mexico or Honduras, found shaky and often substandard and dangerous housing for them, where they lived ten and twelve to a room, made the appropriate payoffs to city officials who might otherwise have been expected to make sure that didn’t happen, and set to work making shoddy repairs, often being none too careful about electrical codes, plumbing codes and other safety regulations. But they filled a need. Then there were a certain percentage who had signs printed up, took the calls, took the down payments, and then simply disappeared.

  People somehow made it back to pull the refrigerators full of rotten and spoiled food out to their curbs. They put on rubber gloves and boots and heavy-duty masks and set to work dragging the soaked and moldy couches out of the shells of their houses, the soaked and heavy carpets, the wrecked appliances, the sodden, unrecognizable clothing, the old rocking chairs with their wood split by the water, the desks and computer equipment and scum-coated flat-screen televisions, the lamps with torn and discolored shades, the vases and broken dishes and corroded flatware, the collapsed bookcases and the bags of soaked and ruined books, the beds and bedspreads and quilts that were unsalvageable, the framed diplomas, browned and ruined in smashed glass. At the end of the day’s work they drove back to their sister’s house in Baton Rouge, or their cousin’s in Hammond, or the hotel that FEMA was temporarily paying for in Lafayette, and they stood under the shower for half an hour. It was after the work they were able to do themselves had been done that the depression and anxiety and frustration began to set in deeply, the waiting and the contradictory and incoherent answers from the various agencies that never seemed to know what was happening, and everyone started knowing people who had committed suicide, or who had gone crazy publicly or privately, or who just sat on a bed or couch all day, watching television in a room somewhere far from home.

  Those were the people with some money, who were able to come back to oversee rebuilding, in parts of the city where there were houses to rebuild and insurance money paid out. But those who lived in areas where the houses had been leveled or smashed to kindling, or pushed off their foundations and left in the middle of a street, or upended from behind like horses with their front knees broken, in areas where any vestige of property lines had been erased and surveying was a problem for the distant future, like parts of the Lower Ninth Ward, or Lakeview or Chalmette, it was almost impossible to know where to begin.

  Around the country, people who had done all they could do finally had to sit and wait. They had filled out the applications, tried to get information, made the phone calls, and eventually they put their children in local schools in Houston or Atlanta or Chicago, got jobs and began rigging up a provisional sense of community, because it was plainly an open question when they would be able to return home. Or they sat, in shock and grief, with no counseling to help them manage the intrusive imagery they had of their mother, who refused to leave, drowned in the living room where they had grown up and had graduation parties, everything they knew transfigured as if in a nightmare, or their wife’s hand slipping out of theirs and watching her sucked underwater, or their neighbor’s calls from inside their attic as they sat helpless to aid them, and then finally no more calls, and there were no mental health clinics to help them, and others couldn’t understand why they didn’t just pull up their socks and do something to help themselves.

  SJ had found an apartment, with Leeshawn’s help; she had had fun setting him up there, taking him to Target. Bed, mirror, couch, lamps, bathmat. He acquired a car through a friend of Aaron’s and set up an informal shuttle service for a handful of New Orleans people who lived nearby who were without transportation, driving them to unemployment offices, or to the store, or to see relatives, and little by little, like a woven bridge across a ravine, or a spider web, a network of vital connection slowly began to construct itself, like a brain and body recovering from a stroke, learning how to work around the damage.

  Those first weeks with Leeshawn were for SJ an oasis in a strange dream. Something unreal about it, yet connected to something essential from long before, some long-ago self. They went to movies, held hands. And yet there was a moat between his experience and hers, and it would become apparent at unexpected times.

  One evening SJ and Leeshawn were sitting down to dinner at Ruby Tuesday’s when a waitress came over to the table, tentatively, saying, “Is that…? Oh Lord…Mister J…I’m Anita; do you remember me? I stay by Law Street.”

  SJ remembered her. She worked for the Sewerage and Water Board. He stood up and embraced the woman, introduced her to Leeshawn.

  Anita told the other waitress who would normally have waited on their table that she would take the table herself. She brought SJ up to date on the people from the neighborhood whose whereabouts she knew. She heard that Mrs. Gray had evacuated but she didn’t know where. Bootsy and his wife she did not know about. Earl and Madeline had been rescued off their roof and she didn’t know where they were. Jawanda—nobody heard from her; I don’t know if she made it, Mister J. Bobby was staying a block from them in Fernwood, the little apartment complex where a number of New Orleanians were staying.

  “The Coast Guard come and got us, Mr. J. I took the helicopter ride; I held on to Kiann tight, tight, like we was going to the moon but they got us in there and dropped us at the airport and next thing they was telling us where to go and here we are. We are blessed we made it through alive. Where Lucy at?” SJ told Anita about Lucy and Wesley, to the woman’s under-the-breath responses of “Praise God.” The same alternation between gratitude and anger, the grappling for equilibrium. “I have a job, my baby okay, she in school. But Mister J how they let this happen? How a whole city go underwater and we still out here and nobody know when we can get back?”

  At the end of the meal, when SJ asked for the bill, Anita said she was taking care of it. SJ protested, but Anita straightened up and shook her head twice, decisively.

  “Mister J, I don’t give a fuck about no money—pardon me, ma’am—but anybody from New Orleans gonna eat free as long as I am working the goddamn shift.”

  SJ left a twenty-dollar bill under the plate for her anyway. In the parking lot, on the way to the car, Leeshawn said, “She won’t have that job long.”

  SJ looked around at the people coming in for dinner, at the traffic going by on Route 28, and said, “People can’t understand what it was to be there. Even people who want to can’t get it. There is a wound.”

  Perhaps Leeshawn felt hurt or excluded by this way of putting it, as if SJ was drawing a line between himself and her, but she said, “But people are going to have to learn how to deal with it. Isn’t that true, SJ? It is going to take a while for people to get back, if ever.”

  They walked along and SJ felt her warm hand in his. The past three weeks had been a time he had never expected to see or feel again. And although what she said was true it also spoke another painful truth behind itself—echoed, in fact, what SJ had himself said immediately before. There was a gulf between those who had had their community smashed and their future thrown completely into question, and those for whom life still moved in an intelligible stream. It was not unlike the line that separated those who had come back from the war and those whose lives had been going on continuously while they had been away. There was an understanding among those who had been there, and a gap between them and those who had not. And, too, SJ could feel under the surface of her remark, like something hidden under a sheet, the worry that SJ might leave her, and he knew this was something they were going to have to discuss. Leeshawn was strong, smart, independent, and yet, despite all their caveats, SJ knew she had let herself fall in love with him.

 
; Was he in love with her? He didn’t suppose he knew. Everything around them was too much up in the air to know. There were too many unsettled questions. She had brought him back to planet earth again, and he knew that. He felt alive, and in his body, in a way he hadn’t in years. But there was a disjunction between this self, walking along in the Houston October twilight in nice new clothes, and the continuity of all that interrupted life in New Orleans. Somehow they would have to be brought into line. Or not, as the case may be. But it was going to take time, and he needed to make sure that she understood that.

  One night, SJ had a dream about his father. He didn’t often remember his dreams or pay them much mind, but this one was almost real. There was a crowd, on the street, a second-line certainly, and the band was playing, and the whole river of everyone they knew and their family was there, and he was dancing with his father, showing each other steps, surrounded by an aura of weird ecstasy. They had never actually second-lined together in life, that SJ could remember, but here they were in this dream, both of them part of the music and the river, ecstatic, relaxation and precision, wit and seriousness, transcendent…

  He awoke, with his heart pounding, with the dream going, and wanting to hold on and stay in it. Leeshawn was asleep in the bed, next to him. He lay there silently in the dark, staring at the ceiling, until the first dim blue light could be seen through the blinds, and then he fell asleep again.