The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

  The ship was gone. The U-boat was gone. And eventually, much later in the day, the survivors were picked up by a couple of rescue ships. Just under half of the ship’s company went down with the wreckage. I asked Mr Kerr why, given the time the ship remained afloat, so many men were lost, and he told me one of the harsher truths. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘but I believe some of the men below may have raided the grog shop after the first torpedo struck; I think a lot of them delayed, getting drunk in the stores.’

  We sat quiet for a while by the front windows, looking down at the loch. ‘I loved my old ship,’ Mr Kerr said eventually. ‘It was a terrible loss.’ Then he picked something out of a bag, an old watch, rusted and broken. ‘I was wearing this as I went down into the water that night,’ he said. ‘The hands are stopped at that exact moment.’

  *

  My grandfather was a good bit older than Mr Kerr, and he was a greaser in the Forfar’s engine-room. The last his family in Glasgow heard of him he was having his cigarette allowance docked for bad behaviour. There’s no way of knowing why he didn’t make it to the lifeboats: they had always said he was good on his feet. But I’d come to know that my grandfather was no longer missing: he was beneath the waves with all that broken metal.

  * Over 1,000 died, though not Kendall, who lived to be ninety-one.

  After Hurricane Katrina

  OCTOBER 2005

  The sky over North Carolina was showing red the night Sam and Terry decided to leave for the South. The red clouds travelled to Smithfield from the western hills, the high Appalachians and the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Great Smokies. Sam Parham is twenty-seven years old and weighs 260 pounds. For an hour or so, right into the dark, he pulled on the starting string of an electric generator he’d borrowed from his father, until the top of his T-shirt was soaked with sweat. ‘Goddamn bitch,’ he said. ‘This muthafucker is brand new. I want the goddamn thing to work. We’re sure gonna need its ass when we get to New Orleans.’

  Sam’s neighbour had chickens outside his trailer and frogs were hiding in the pine trees along the drive. An American flag hung limply on the porch as Sam inspected the back of his truck with a giant torch, the crickets going zeep-zeep-zeep and red ants crowding in the oil at his feet. ‘I just can’t watch those TV pictures of children stranded and not go down there,’ Sam said, while Yolande, his pregnant girlfriend, sat on the porch and opened a can of Mountain Dew and lit another cigarette.

  Yolande was wearing her uniform from the Waffle House, where she works the night shift. ‘You can’t expect me to agree,’ she said. ‘But I respect you for doing it, Sam. I just think it’s the government should be doing it.’

  ‘I’m just a blue-collar guy or whatever,’ said Sam. ‘And I’m gonna do what I can if the country needs me.’

  Terry Harper is a co-worker of Yolande’s at the Waffle House. As we drove along Interstate 95 to pick him up, house-lights flared in the distance and Yolande started talking about God. ‘My daddy knows the Bible one hand to the other and when he starts speaking at you it’s like preachin’,’ she said. North Carolina was the birthplace of Billy Graham and three US presidents – Andrew Johnson, James Polk and Andrew Jackson – and also, among the twinkling lights out there, you could find the uncelebrated birthplace of Thomas Wolfe, the North Carolinian who wrote Look Homeward, Angel. As the truck got nearer the Waffle House, someone on the radio made the point that North Carolina was itself no stranger to hurricanes – Hazel (1954), Hugo (1989), Fran (1996), Floyd (1999). It’s no stranger to racism either. The Neuse river, the Roanoke river and the Yadkin river, named, like so much in the state, by the native Indian population that was cleared to make way for the twinkling lights and Interstate 95, have been known to burst their banks and flood the plains. The radio was silent on the fact that America’s first ever sit-in occurred at Greensboro, North Carolina, to protest against segregation at a lunch counter.

  ‘They’re not cookin’ more than $200 a night,’ said Yolande, ‘and I can do that on coffee and Coca-Cola if I’m tired.’ She was planning to take over Terry’s shifts so that he could make the trip south. Terry was mild mannered, imperturbable, sucking juice out of a Waffle House cup. He is a fifty-year-old black man with a short moustache and a gap between his teeth. He was born in Pitt County but spent his happiest days in Atlanta. Terry sat at the counter of the Waffle House waiting for a decision. It turned out he needed more than Yolande to cover his shifts, so we went in search of another worker, Ashley, who has kids on her own and needs the money. She doesn’t have a telephone, but Sam found her house in the rundown Wilson area, next to a railway crossing. It was seventy-five degrees in the dark. Ashley came out from a house that flashed blue with television pictures and she jumped up and down on the porch at the prospect of having more shifts at the Waffle House. ‘It’s the lowest of the low works for the Waffle House,’ Sam said. ‘Would you look at her jumping up and down, the immaturity of her. She’s got kids. Look at where we’re at.’ He took a long look into the bleak houses at the edge of the projects. ‘My sister was murdered,’ he said. ‘She was killed by an injection of liquid crack-cocaine. They tried to say she had a drug problem but she had no drug problem. She was killed.’

  Ashley’s two kids were cowering in their pyjamas in the back of the truck with the neon of the fast-food marquees shining in their eyes. They were delivered to a babysitter in Lenoir Drive, a place that seemed to be exclusively black, young women sitting on the stoop while boys played basketball on the street in cap-sleeve jerseys. Ashley says she gets $2.85 an hour. Driving back to the Waffle House, Ashley and Yolande were gossiping about other members of staff. ‘You know that TV show As the World Turns?’ Yolande said. ‘Well, there’s more soap in the goddamn restaurant. We call it “As the Waffle Burns”.’

  Sam was using the internet as he drove at 70 mph. He kept the laptop balanced between the two front seats, and had a wireless connection, so he was able to look up weather and news reports as he drove, clicking on the keypad and sometimes using the shift key. When not on the internet, and not talking about the shape and meaning of his life, Sam was often on his mobile phone. He has, as he keeps saying, ‘unlimited’, which means that his payment plan allows him to call anywhere in America as often as he likes. He spent great portions of every day on the phone to Yolande, or to his former wife, or his children, often when he was driving, and the calls often ended in arguments. ‘You know about the hurricane, right?’ Sam said to his son Zak. ‘I’m going down there to help the people. It’s what we have to do. The people need our help.’

  After speaking to his children, Sam would grow listless for a while, as if love and regret were together taking their toll. He stared into the windscreen as the night came on and his plans fell into alignment. ‘I seem to get myself into these situations where I just help people all the time,’ he said. Then he rang his grandmother and put her on speakerphone.

  ‘Don’t run into a brawl or anything, Sammy,’ cause a lot of those people are just crazy right now.’

  By 12.10 a.m., the back of the truck heaped with chainsaw, power generator, giant toolbox and assorted jacks, Sam and Terry had left Smithfield and before long were heading down the Purple Heart Memorial Highway. Sam split his attention equally between the road and the laptop. His love of the internet explained my presence in the back of the truck: like tens of thousands of Americans in the days after the hurricane, Sam had advertised himself on the net as a willing volunteer and I found him and followed him. ‘Here,’ he said, chucking Terry a carton of painkillers. ‘Don’t say I ain’t good to you.’ Terry has a bad case of gout in his right leg and it makes him hobble. When not on the phone, Sam talked into thin air, addressing himself. ‘Why did the Good Lord bring Hurricane Katrina?’ he asked. ‘Man, it’s life, it’s evolution. Shit happens. But the thing that matters is what you do about it as a person. If some guy comes to rape my wife, why, this is America: I’m gonna put a cap in his ass. I’m gonna give him a hot one and let him leak.�
� As if to confirm his point, Sam lifted a small blue medical bag that was hanging on the rear-view mirror. It contained a gun with the clip inserted and the safety catch on. He waved the gun over the steering wheel. ‘They’re gonna get this in the ass,’ he said.

  Terry wanted to sleep a little until the painkillers took hold. And when he woke, somewhere in South Carolina, Sam was saying how much he admired George W. Bush. ‘I voted for Bush last time,’ he said. ‘I liked the way he handled 9/11. He’s a strong president. Hell, he’s my commander-in-chief.’ Terry gave him a long, weary look, and rubbed his eyes. Neither Sam nor Terry has ever possessed a passport and they speak of the world beyond America as if it were a hidden territory of oddness, weakness and unreality. Sam stopped the truck at a gas station.

  ‘I feel better,’ Terry said. ‘I’m gonna smoke me some Turkish Jades.’ And with that he hopped out of the truck and headed for the all-night window.

  ‘He’s poor as shit, man,’ said Sam. ‘No money at all. And he’s going down to Mississippi in this bitch to help with somethin’ that’s got nothing to do with him.’ The road south – the flashing grass, the beat of the signs – seemed to direct Sam into a landscape of clear memory. He was born in Palm Beach, Florida, and within six months had been adopted by his grandmother. His mother was an alcoholic and he was left on a window ledge in Pennsylvania in the dead of winter. That’s when his grandmother came and took him to live in Maine.

  ‘We got some of the same issues,’ said Terry. ‘My mother dropped me off in North Carolina when I was four years old and I never saw her again.’

  ‘We came to North Carolina in 1984,’ said Sam. ‘We moved into my uncle’s camper and then spent a while living in a tent. We got a house eventually. I remember my biological mother coming to the house in Greensboro and she tried to kidnap me. She took me out in the middle of the night when I was asleep. The cops came and I’d never seen so many blue lights.’

  ‘A white baby kidnapped,’ said Terry.

  ‘Yeh,’ said Sam. ‘If a black kid disappeared nobody cared back then, but if a white kid was taken there would be cops crawling outta the grass.’

  At the gas station, water was leaking from a drainpipe and it ran down the wall to arrive on top of a newspaper vending machine. Terry paused beside it to light one of his menthol cigarettes. The paper was out of date, but, through the glass, there was a story about the desperate situation in New Orleans. It said the government was under fire for the slowness of the rescue operation. ‘It now looks like the South will be relying on volunteers. It may turn out to be one of the greatest volunteer operations this country has ever seen. President Bush said it made him proud to witness the response of everyday working Americans.’ A second story said the ordeal had opened ‘an old wound’ about race in America.

  Not far from the Chattahoochee river, Sam parked the truck in a lay-by and reclined his seat for a few hours’ sleep. As he snored, Terry saw a Great Blue Heron fly over the truck and swoop down towards the interstate. ‘Heading south in search of water,’ he said. ‘Just like us.’

  Terry believes that racism has followed him all his life. He grew up only twenty minutes from the ocean in North Carolina and helped truck tobacco when he was ten years old. ‘That was my first job,’ he said. ‘My second job was in the graveyard, burying bodies at fifty dollars a grave. I was sixteen and still at Ayden-Grifton High School. That was how I paid for everything, sports, prom: digging graves.’ At school, Terry got deeply involved in civil rights actions. He speaks of a white state trooper who was cleared of murdering two young black men, the Murphy brothers. There was a dawn to dusk curfew at that time, but Terry and his friends would go out at night and set fire to cornfields. Terry says he tried to shoot the state trooper one night with a borrowed rifle. He waited all night in a ditch and when he fired he missed the policeman by three inches. Later, Terry and a group of his friends got some dynamite from a demolition company and tried to blow up their high school. Terry was detained by a teacher and so was not present when the bomb was set off. His friends were charged and found guilty. ‘Yep,’ said Terry. ‘Those boys went down. Two of them, the Raspberry twins, got twenty years apiece.’

  In the early 1970s, Terry joined the Black Panthers. A number of things drew him into the movement: his childhood experience of racist murders, an instinct for self-defence, and the charismatic influence of the Panther members from Chicago who visited North Carolina to inspire younger black men to force a change in the fabric of America and, Terry said as the truck sped forward into the Alabama sun, ‘to kill a few people’.

  ‘Cool,’ said Sam. Though he’d taken a week off from his work as a cable television engineer to help with the relief effort, Sam still had to deliver his work records and invoices from the previous week. He worried about it across several states and eventually pulled into a Days Inn near Birmingham, Alabama. Terry looked up. ‘This is where Bull O’Connor, the police chief, turned his damn German shepherds on those little black girls,’ he said. ‘Then he turned a fire hose on those poor fuckers who were marching.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Sam, parking the truck with one hand. As the woman at the Days Inn took her time to book us into the room, Sam disconnected the internet cable from the back of her computer. ‘Whore,’ said Sam.

  ‘Let’s just get inside and rest a while,’ said Terry.

  The room was dirty and the sheets didn’t fit the bed. Terry decided to call reception to complain. ‘For seventy-eight dollars a person might expect hot water and fitted sheets,’ he said.

  Meanwhile, Sam marched into the room and put his gun down on the table and held up a bunch of papers. ‘This represents fifteen hundred fuckin’ dollars,’ he said. ‘And if I don’t get them faxed to fuckin’ North Carolina in ten minutes I don’t get paid next week. This shit’s fucked up. The bastard machine only takes three fucked-up papers at a time.’ Quietly, Terry removed the clip from the gun.

  ‘George Wallace, the governor, said over my dead body would any nigger go to school here.’

  ‘It was them blacks that started racism in the first place,’ Sam said. Sweat was dropping onto the pages he aimed to fax.

  Terry wanted to stop in Atlanta on the way back to see his son, who was refusing to go to school. Terry hadn’t seen his son in several years and said he just needed ten minutes. ‘His black ass is on the fifty-yard line,’ Terry said. ‘Not going to muthafuckin’ school. That’s unacceptable to me. I’ll kick his black ass when I get him.’

  The TV was showing a movie about a police SWAT team, and Sam, his pages travelling slowly through his mobile fax machine, stuck out his tongue and made shooting noises at the screen. ‘You’re one dead fucker,’ Terry said to Colin Farrell, the actor on the screen. ‘You’re gone.’ As he watched the movie, Terry opened a tin of clam chowder and ate it cold with a stolen spoon, following it with a red drink called Tahitian Fruit Punch.

  Terry woke up to find Sam lying on the next bed and the TV saying that New Orleans was depending on the kindness of strangers. ‘It’s a known fact,’ Terry said, ‘that the police and emergency services are, minimum, fifteen minutes slower to attend calls in black areas, so it’s no surprise that they were slower to help the South when it was in trouble. If this had happened in a white area they would’ve been out there the same day plucking them white folks out the water.’

  It had grown dark outside and we were thinking of setting off again. Sam was surfing the net for porn and talking to his ex-wife at the same time. ‘I’d hope that if I was stuck up on a roof that someone would come get me offa there,’ he said. ‘This is America. People do their best.’ His ex-wife was niggling him about family duties. ‘If something terrible happens to me, you’re gonna feel bad,’ he said. ‘Yes, ma’am. You surely are.’ After a minute of silence and finger-flicking, Sam’s tone changed and he seemed to lean further into the phone. ‘Do you know what tantric sex is?’ he asked. He was still looking at his laptop. ‘It’s mind-fucking!’

  Terry was in
the bathroom when Sam came rushing into the motel room with a giant grin on his face. ‘Terry! Hey. Hot blondes outside!’ Terry immediately came through and started whistling from the door. Sam laughed. ‘You ain’t gonna get them by whistling like they was dogs, dude.’ A while later, a handsome young couple, Cory and Aimee Exterstein, arrived at the Days Inn reception desk with their two children. Cory was wearing a baseball cap that said Louisiana State University. They looked exhausted, and the children were half-asleep. Their house had been destroyed by floodwater in New Orleans and they had managed to escape with the children and a few blankets. They told the woman at the desk that FEMA was saying that evacuees could stay at Days Inn motels and FEMA would pay the costs.

  ‘I don’t know nothin’ about that,’ the woman said.

  The young man was getting frustrated and his wife began to cry. ‘We’re just looking for some help here,’ he said. ‘We don’t have anything and the boys are tired. We’ve been driving all day.’

  The woman behind the desk suddenly grew hostile and self-pitying. ‘I don’t get paid enough to deal with this,’ she said. ‘This gentleman’ – she pointed to Terry, who was standing in the foyer – ‘is looking for more towels and I don’t have any kind of help here.’

  Mr Exterstein used the motel phone to call FEMA but things were chaotic and the person he spoke to didn’t know how to help them. His wife put her elbows on the desk and sobbed behind her hands.