City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  He sat up in bed. He had had the same sensation in Elba, at the Myerses’s house, but now he knew where he was and he stood up, walked out of the room quietly so as not to wake Lucy—could it have been an intruder?—no lights on, just the barest film of silver gray in the less-than-total darkness through the drawn drapes as he made his way down the short hall past the bathroom and out into the living room, leaving aside to his right the end table he knew to be there, and then the coffee table and then his stride interrupted by something that made him stumble and twist to break his fall, and he knew even before he knew, reached out and touched what he knew to be her hip and he hollered out the word “Mama!” in the dark.

  He scrambled forward to touch, feel if she was breathing, talking quickly to her, are you all right, felt for her hand, which was cold, so cold, and he had the presence of mind to stand up and run to the kitchen and call 911 immediately, shaking, and the light from the kitchen finding her misarranged legs on the living room floor as he told the dispatcher that his mother was dead, or dying, he couldn’t tell, and gave the address, twice, and the phone number, said hurry, my mama going to die, hurry…and then hung up the phone as quickly as he could and went in to kneel on the floor beside her and feel to see if she was breathing, which she wasn’t, and to put his arms around her and press himself against her as if it were possible to get back in the person who had given him a lifetime of such precious and imperfect love, to inhabit her as if such a thing were ever possible, and say, Oh no, Mama…Mama…Oh no…Mama, sobbing, there, on the floor, praying to bring her back just long enough to tell her just this, this thing he had no words for except I love you, and that would have been enough.

  At the medical examiner’s office, the pathologist, Dr. Gupta, told them—SJ, Wesley, Leeshawn, Aaron and Dot—that the autopsy showed evidence of a massive heart attack, quite possibly precipitated by the intense stress of the past weeks.

  “We see this all the time,” he said, as if to be reassuring, and with what SJ told himself was not a faint smile, and which, in fact was not, but rather a slight embarrassment. “So many from New Orleans. Stress is a killer.”

  “Were there preexisting conditions that could have had anything to do with it?” Leeshawn asked.

  “Yes, yes; certainly,” the doctor said, closing his eyes and nodding, slightly smiling. “There were clear signs of congestive heart failure. We could not retrieve the records from the hospital in New Orleans, of course, but I would assume she was on medications, perhaps that she was not taking regularly?”

  SJ nodded, looked at the floor. Wesley looked as if he was in shock, which he was. There was not a lot more to say. The coroner asked where to send the body and Aaron gave them the name of their local funeral home. There, they asked Wesley if he had a strong feeling about whether Lucy should be embalmed or cremated, and he shrugged, his eyes dead, far off someplace. “I don’t see why it makes a difference,” he said. “She dead.” Then as if remembering a question he wanted to ask, he said, “Did she say anything to you?”

  “She said she didn’t want to be buried here,” SJ said. “She in fact said she didn’t care which way, but that she wanted to go back to New Orleans.”

  In the end, they decided to have her cremated—the difference in cost was eight thousand dollars by the most conservative estimate—and SJ and Wesley agreed that they would take her ashes back to New Orleans, together, and put them someplace where she would have wanted them. Back somewhere in the Lower Nine.

  25

  It was still dark when SJ awoke in his apartment, alone, washed his face and pulled on the clothes he had laid out the night before. He opened a small duffel bag and threw in an extra shirt and some work gloves and walked downstairs and outside in the chill, dark air, across the parking lot of his apartment building and got into his car’s cold driver’s seat and headed out. It was November 10.

  He was ready for this, he told himself. In fact, he did not know if he was ready, but he was going anyway. Before he could go with Wesley to bury Lucy, he needed to face it alone. He had told nobody about the trip, because he knew that Leeshawn, Aaron and Wesley would each want to go with him, each one for his or her own reasons, and this was a trip he needed to make on his own.

  A half hour out of Houston the sky began to lighten, and he drove through the long reaches of east Texas with the sun coming up ahead of him. It was a bright morning by the time he crossed the border into Louisiana. The traffic slowed when he approached Baton Rouge, thickened and stayed thick until New Orleans.

  SJ took the Franklin Street exit off the I-10, planning to drive down Franklin a few blocks and turn left on Claiborne heading for the bridge over the Industrial Canal, which divided the Upper Ninth Ward from the Lower Ninth Ward. But descending into the Upper Nine from the interstate was a shock. From the I-10 he had passed the blue tarps on the roofs, the evidence, at a distance, of the cleanup and wreckage, but now it was as if he were riding a submarine into a shipwreck. The garbage everywhere lining the deserted streets, the grimy houses with the obscene brown waterlines on the shingles, the open doors like idiots’ mouths, tongues lolling, vacant broken windows, the spray-painted signs on every façade indicating who had searched, and when, and how many bodies had been found. He had prepared himself as well as he could, but actually seeing it knocked you off whatever horse you happened to be on. He drove slowly down Franklin.

  They were still not officially letting people back into the Lower Nine. Cleanup was being done on a large scale, and bodies were still being found. But he had planned to feel his way in. As he topped the Claiborne Bridge he could see the temporary repairs where the levee had burst, and just inside, a barge sitting at an angle. Beyond it, the Nine looked like a giant junk yard, spare parts or salvage, and the view folded up on itself as SJ drove down the other side of the bridge.

  There was a checkpoint at the bottom, and a serviceman in camo approached his car as he rolled to a stop. SJ lowered his window; there were crews working, bulldozers, cats…SJ checked the stripes on the soldier’s arm as he walked up to the car, gave a very small salute and said, “Good morning, Sergeant.”

  The young man bent down slightly to look in the window at SJ. Before the soldier could have a chance to tell him he couldn’t come in, SJ spoke first.

  “My house is on North Derbigny Street, and I’d like to do a short recon of it if I might, and secure some valuables I had to leave behind. I know it isn’t procedure, but I drove in from Houston.” SJ said, producing his driver’s license with his address on it.

  The young man looked at it cursorily, looked around him outside the car, looked back in at SJ. “You lived here?”

  “Yes, sir. My house was still standing when I left.”

  “Veteran?”

  “101st Airborne.”

  The young man nodded, straightened again and signaled to another soldier a block away, leaned back to SJ again and said, “You can proceed. I’d advise you to drive as little as possible because of the amount of debris still in some of the streets. If you pop a flat it’s gonna be pretty difficult to get it repaired.” Hint of a smile.

  “I’ll watch myself, Sergeant. Thank you.”

  The young sergeant tapped the sill of the open driver’s window as SJ drove past and turned into what had been Reynes Street, waving at the other soldier stationed there.

  Half a block in from Claiborne it was already too much to absorb.

  This landscape could have been on the moon, or in some battle zone about which he had only read. The horizon was lower by exactly the angle of the houses that were no longer standing. The streets had been bulldozed to make way for the cleanup teams, and the division into blocks was still intelligible, although almost every trace of individual property lines had been effaced. Perhaps four houses still standing—somehow—between his car and the canal, and the very occasional tree. The rest of it reduced to shards, sticks, rags. A car upside down, tires in the air. A roof on top of a pile of rubble, a smashed floor fan…
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br />   Everything in the Lower Ninth Ward had been defiled. Mud, rust, dirt, and grit coated everything. If there was a hurricane fence it had been twisted, tortured into rusty chicken wire. If a roof had landed on rubble, it had been cracked at the peak like a wishbone. Sleeveless LP records, warped, cracked, perhaps the labels still readable as the Spinners, the O’Jays, Frankie Beverly. Door frames, cinder blocks, sheets and towels fouled with mud, the odd stuffed animal. The water had pushed one house halfway into the street at an angle, and its front wall had been torn out; inside it, the jumble of furniture and clothes, and a mud-coated chandelier, still improbably hanging above the sodden mess. Across the street, the cab of a semi, on its side, grill and windshield visible through the smashed window frames and weatherboards. Here and there a cement slab that had been a driveway, and nothing else. Three cement steps up into a nonexistent house. Exquisite ironwork, wrought into filigree for a gate or a railing, rusting now. Once in a while, like an ambush, he drove through an invisible cloud with a smell that made him want to be anywhere but there, an intolerable smell that spoke of a body not yet discovered, a smell that SJ remembered from the army, one you did not forget, ever.

  He turned right, slowly, on what he knew to be North Derbigny. With each block heading away from the canal, the destruction was slightly less absolute. Certain blocks had as many as two or three houses, or structures still identifiable as houses, although these, too, had been defiled, windows smashed, car still in the driveway covered with debris, tree leaning into the smashed roof. In between the standing structures, avalanches of junk, parts of houses, everything that had been at the bottom of the lake he had paddled on two and a half months before. And over it all, the sky, lilting blue, treacherously tranquil.

  SJ crossed what had been Forstall Street onto their block, and halfway down, standing exposed instead of nestled among other houses, was his house. Across the street, Bootsy’s house presented a lobotomized face, a smudgy, greasy high-water line two feet below the peak of the roof, and smashed windows that revealed only a dark, unconscious interior. Next door to SJ’s own house was the collapsed skeleton of Mrs. Gray’s.

  He pulled up in front; his house was missing most of its façade, and he could almost see into the wrecked interior over the small mountain of garbage that covered the driveway area. Above the roof of the front part of the house, set back, the front of the camelback with its open window, which he had last seen from the police boat, at eye level, and the greasy brown high-water line along the side of the house and, surprisingly, the sheets he had tied together to let himself down and get back out of the water still hanging down, browned and shredded but still knotted to the gutter pipe.

  SJ turned his motor off and sat quietly behind the wheel for some moments.

  The silence of the Lower Nine came flooding into his car, carrying with it the fact of where he was, as if the weight of the waters themselves were pushing him down into his seat. SJ decided to look at his dashboard for a bit, to collect himself. The steering column had a light film of dust on it, and SJ wiped off a line with his finger, then another.

  This was right on the edge, he thought, of being too much. He struggled with the impulse to turn the key in the ignition and put the car in gear, drive off, don’t look back. This was right on the edge, and he did not know if he could handle it. Right on the edge. But one thing that he did realize was that if he left at this point he would not be able to come back. He saw that quickly. It would be a burned bridge. Things were not settled here. Things were not settled inside himself. If he left without confronting it, he was defeated, and along with him his family, and the life he knew. He would be handing over the keys. That was clear.

  He looked out the passenger window at his broken house. This was what he had left of a past. Leave without reaching back into it to see what was there, whether there was anything left to build on, and he might as well cash it in. He might be able to go on living in his brand-new apartment in Houston, but he would never know what the point was, or if there was one.

  SJ closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths sitting there, behind the wheel. The air smelled bad, bad. Another breath, then, forcing himself, he opened his car door and put one foot out onto North Derbigny Street, stepped out and stood up in the fouled air under the brilliant sky. He shut the driver’s door and walked around the front bumper, toward his house.

  He needed to find a way over or around the unstable garbage that blocked his driveway. George’s house, next door, was gone, nothing left of it. Mrs. Gray’s house was a mountain of junk leaning on itself next to his house, barely distinguishable from all the debris piled next to it. Slats and weatherboard and wood and a box fan and someone’s couch, upside down. Carefully, SJ picked his way over the wood, threaded together like pick-up sticks, testing each step before putting his full weight on it, holding on to some larger piece or, at one point, a Volkswagen that had lodged nose-down in the mess. It had all been pushed by the water, and then pushed by the bulldozers that were clearing the streets.

  Because SJ had set his house back seven feet, all this junk sat where his curved driveway had been instead of being up against his house. He saw no evidence of his truck. Either it was buried under the garbage, he thought, or maybe the water had pushed it blocks away. After several minutes of painstaking climbing, testing, balancing, stepping, miraculously SJ found the cement steps leading up to his porch. At the foot of the steps, he knew, was the horseshoe he had laid into the cement when he put in the walk, but that was buried. The top two steps were not, however, and he stepped onto his porch—slippery, watch out—for the first time since the storm.

  He stepped over some debris and through the torn-off front of his house into what had been the living room, which was no longer really a room but an annex of a garbage dump, a landfill with a ceiling. This was his first impression, before the individual elements began to make themselves visible. A place that had expressed life, turned now into its opposite, a place where time meant not growth but decay. All these objects that had once been endowed with life, now mocked. That was certainly the couch, which he had seen floating upside-down from the upstairs landing, come to rest against the side wall at the foot of the stairs. Plaster, curtains, smashed weatherboard, ceiling fan. On a built-in shelf across the room—two little vases, relics of Rosetta. How in God’s name were they still there? He would retrieve those before he left.

  A broom, plastic bottles, smashed blinds, curtains, bricks, pieces of plaster and more plaster, shards of Sheetrock, all mixed up together, on top of each other. Not a lot of floor exposed to walk on. Along the tops of the walls, mold spreading like camouflage, green, brown and gray and black kaleidoscopic tiny spots and large spots and clusters of spots. SJ climbed toward the stairs, stepped, almost slipped, stepped with small steps and one or two long ones, holding on. Near the bottom of the stairs, unmistakably, an ornate picture frame, a picture facedown. He reached for it and turned it over, and he recognized it as the photo of his parents taken at their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party that he had kept on the television. The glass had been broken out; his mother was visible, if slightly obscured by water damage, standing sideways and looking at the camera with her hands out in front of her, holding hands with an invisible partner, his father; the paper had curled back from the frame, soaked, and his father was a grainy explosion of white and green mold. He set the picture back down on a pile of junk.

  Carefully, SJ climbed the stairs, which were slick with scum until near the top, and then he was on the landing. He stepped into his bedroom, to the left, where he and Lucy had rode out the storm, light now, with the windows open as he had left them. Mold all over the rear wall, but not the other two. There on the floor was the duffel bag he had packed and never taken. The room was more or less just as he had left it. He had been worried about looting, but maybe prospective looters had decided to concentrate on areas that hadn’t been so manifestly trashed. The area was pretty well patrolled by military and marshals, although no
body had yet challenged his presence there.

  On the dresser, his father’s watch and gold piece, wrapped in the handkerchief, just as he had left them. He picked up the duffel and was about to set it on the bed, which he had left bare after stripping it for the sheets that he had used to haul himself in and out of the water. He set the bag down on the floor, pulled up the blanket which had been bunched at the foot of the bed, pulled it even and folded it down at the top, grabbed the pillow from the floor and set it at the head. Then he set the duffel on the bed. Into it he placed the watch and gold piece, along with a few other things from his dresser, a tie clasp, a few linen handkerchiefs. He went into the drawer and retrieved the photo he had found on the morning of the storm, of himself and Rosetta at the nightclub in Texas. Then he sat down on the bed and looked around at his bedroom, the room he had shared with Rosetta, the room where he had slept for so many years. All his energy had deserted him suddenly, as if the power steering had gone out on him. He sat on his bed. He sat there for a long time.

  After a while he was all right again. Across from him was the dresser, the framed photo of Rosetta. On the wall, the framed print of the man and the woman praying in the field at sunset. The rear window, which used to look out on the back of a house, now offered a view across Claiborne all the way to Holy Cross. The landscape had changed utterly, so ruined, so violated, so brutalized. And yet—this was an undeniable and strange music—sitting there on his bed in his room he felt a sense of comfort that he had not felt since the storm. Not in his new apartment in Houston with all the new things in it, not at familiar Aaron and Dot’s, not at Leeshawn’s. This was his place. Wounded so profoundly, but still there, somehow. The wound would bleed forever, perhaps, and when he thought of what was outside, and what it meant, it was too much to take in. And yet if he started from where he was at that moment, from where he was …He could not quite get his hands around what he was feeling. But for the first time since the storm, except for that first time with Leeshawn (that was a good thing to remember), he felt that he was, somehow, in the present, instead of in a synthetic substitute for the present…That in itself was worth something, and maybe it was worth everything.