by Tony Dunbar
He tried the TV just to be sure it wouldn’t work. Then he remembered that the clock radio in the downstairs guest bedroom operated on back-up battery power when the electricity was off. He had learned this once when all the fuses blew. He went to get it, impressed with his own ingenious memory.
WWL clear-channel talk radio was on the air, and the news wasn’t so bad. Some of the Superdome roof had been ripped off, but the people inside were mostly dry and well-behaved. The worst of the storm was belting the Mississippi coast and moving inland. Entergy reported about two hundred thousand customers might be without power. Many trees had blown down. There were reports of flooding in the Lower Ninth Ward, but that was to be expected. That’s why they called it “lower.” Katrina had left a heck of a mess, but the city had basically survived the punch.
Tubby felt tired, but brave. He had been right to stick around, and now he had a story he could tell his grandkids. As the sun rose higher he feasted on dry Wheat Chex with Tony Chacherie’s sprinkled on top. A little later in the morning he ventured out again and encountered Charlie Schuman, a doctor he knew, walking his goofy Irish setter around the debris on the sidewalk. They exchanged greetings, and Charlie said he had a freezer full of T-bones and venison that would surely go bad soon. He invited Tubby over for a barbecue that evening, and Tubby said I’ll be there.
The rain was entirely gone by early afternoon. The weather was balmy, and Tubby was clearing brush out of his back yard. He took a break and turned on the radio again. There were reports of a breach in the levee on the Seventeenth Street Canal. That was a sad thing. It meant some residences in Lakeview would flood. But it was also about ten miles from Tubby’s house.
A while later, a caller on Spud McConnell’s talk show was heard to say, “Dude, there’s water coming down Carrollton Avenue.”
McConnell said, “We cannot confirm what you’ve just told us.”
“Well, man, I’m looking right at it,” the caller insisted.
It was the cocktail hour. Tubby wandered outside hoping to find somebody who would offer him one, and he found water rippling over his shoes. It gurgled around among the leaves and branches underfoot. He tried to locate the source by climbing through the brush to the next block, but the water was flowing everywhere and was now ankle-deep. He hacked back to his house thinking he must block the spaces under the doors with towels and get the tools off the floor of his shed.
The freshet was making his yard squishy. It had never been this high before, never. Thoughts of free barbecue were forgotten.
7
After hours of dragging everything he considered important upstairs, and watching the water rise over his front steps and wash aside his futile barriers, watching it turn his carpets a deeper blue, Tubby fell exhausted onto his bed. He had eaten nothing more than crackers and canned tuna fish for a long time. What day it was no longer mattered. His available fluids now consisted of some brown stuff coming out of the tap, dozens of bottles of Schweppes tonic water and Canada Dry club soda, some very old liquors with dangerous-looking sugar crusted around the caps, and six tiny cans of pineapple juice. He couldn’t shave or brush his teeth. He was wary of using the toilet, wondering if the drain might back up into his house, and he was too mad at the whole world to do anything but collapse.
Early Tuesday morning he awoke to a watery wonderland. His sofa bobbed pleasantly in the dining room below. Chairs floated on their backs around the kitchen, taking a much needed rest. He thought of his hip waders, but they were in the garage. He put on old pants, old sneakers, and a scowl and took the final steps down the stairs. The brown tide caught him right below the knees. Trailing a frothy wake, he sloshed to the front door. It was hard to open, but he got it done. The lake was there to meet him. As far as the eye could see. Well, what to do?
Salvaging his boat might be a good idea. He contemplated trying to swim across the yard, but the thought of splashing this stuff into his mouth made his skin crawl. So he went in feet first, and shivered when he sank below his belt before hitting turf. Oh, Lord. Fifty feet to the driveway had never seemed so far. He howled in pain as he turned his ankle in an underwater tree branch.
Then it came over him, the mean jaw, the determination, the will to survive, and he splashed, and stumbled, and forced himself through the awful soup to the Lost Lady, his twenty-foot Triton with the Mercury engine. It was still hooked to the trailer and was barely afloat with a foot of rain water inside. Gamely he set to work unstrapping the trailer and bailing out his precious little vessel with a child’s red beach bucket that happened merrily along.
Pandemonium reigned in the capital of Hell. It was the new Sheriff Mulé’s prison located at the bottom of the New Orleans bowl. When the water poured in all the guards ran upstairs. An intrepid captain rallied his men, realizing that common decency required doing something for the hundreds of prisoners chest-deep in the foaming brine. Official communications had all been knocked out. The electricity that powered not just the lights but also the cell locking mechanisms was gone. The office staff had all clocked out the day before. The stranded night shift was entirely on its own.
Bonner was trying to fend off the other lunatics he was stuck with. The man who had been rocking now howled like a blue tick hound baying at the moon. Three or four others had gotten into a shoving match and were thrashing about in the water trying to drown each other. A man pleaded on his knees for the help of the Lord, the fetid water baptizing his shoulders.
Apparently there was not a well-thought-out evacuation plan for this joint.
A few of the black uniforms returned, and they were brave men. They earned twelve thousand dollars a year, and they had families in danger somewhere. Still they were willing to venture into the swill and rescue the cats they were charged with keeping off the streets. They opened up the cell door with some sort of a master key. It took two of them to force the gate across Rivette’s cell to slide back.
“Out! Out!” the deputies ordered, pointing to a stairwell at the end of a long corridor. Other prisoners were already swimming in that direction. “Everyone upstairs!” they shouted.
Bonner was one of the last to tread water into the hall. Always the good Samaritan, he dragged behind him the floating corpse of one poor Mexican who had been drowned in the fight.
“Leave that one here!” the guard shouted, and hurried as best he could through the rising water to the front of the line. Bonner saw a door marked attorney visits, prepare to be searched, in the opposite direction. He slid down into the water with his corpse and gently drifted away. The door to the visitation room wasn’t locked. He left his cellmate behind, and floated on through.
Bonner kept floating, on his back mostly, past a row of visitors’ chairs and into the waiting area for the jail. He dog-paddled quietly past the desk where guards would typically be watching everything on their closed-circuit TVs. He reached the front glass door, which unfortunately was locked. No matter. He located a steel chair and smashed through the glass, standing with water up to his armpits. There was no one around to stop him.
Swimming through the glass he found himself in an outdoor walkway within the prison grounds. He still had the perimeter wall to contend with—ten feet of concrete blocks with a New England granite facade topped by a springy coil of razor wire. Bonner respected that product. He had earned thirty stitches trying to get across it once in Arkansas.
At the risk of recapture, he retraced his route back into the jail and through the attorney visiting area. His Mexican was floating just a few feet from where he’d been left, face down against a Coke machine. Bonner grabbed him by the collar and pulled him along until they were both outside again. A floodlight and generator assembly had been overcome by the deluge, and the light pole had toppled against the wall. Rivette used this as a ladder. He got one arm over the top of the bricks, barely sliding it under the deadly stainless steel knifelets. With all of his strength he pulled his Mexican up and over the coil. The criminal jammed the corpse firmly into th
e steel teeth so that it would not easily dislodge. The necessary padding was now in place. Taking his time, he worked his own body, inch by inch, out of the water and on top of his new friend. They lay together, while Rivette gasped and spat out sludge, conjugally joined. When Bonner had caught his breath he pushed off and cleared the wire, falling into the water on the other side and leaving his companion stuck behind. He was free once more.
Free, that is, in murky water up to his neck. It was still nighttime, and the city was blacked out. A lake stretched in front of him for hundreds of yards. He did not know it, but he was straining to see across Interstate 10, which was totally engulfed. All he knew was that it looked like a long and dangerous swim to the other side. Rivette summoned the aid of friendly salamanders and snakes. Then he noticed that to his left, just a block away, was an overpass. He could even see dark figures moving about there. Behind him were prison walls and the faint cries of suffering humanity. He started swimming, stroking at an easy pace, toward that overpass.
Tubby got the Lost Lady seaworthy. Using a paddle to push past mailboxes and cars, and using the trolling motor sparingly, he managed to proceed onto State Street and over to Claiborne Avenue, where the water was deeper and the sailing smoother. A woman waved at him from the upstairs window of a yellow stucco house, and he carefully puttered in her direction.
“Can you help us?” she pleaded.
“I’ll try.” He steered into her yard and encountered a submerged hedge. “Far as I can go,” he yelled. “Do you think you can swim over here?”
She did, along with a sullen teenager with a tie-dyed shirt and a nose ring, and a little boy about ten who was enjoying the entire adventure. Mom looked tired. Tubby helped them all crawl into the boat.
“Where do you think we should go?” he asked when they were settled in their seats. He was totally inexperienced in nautical rescues on urban streets.
“I don’t know,” the woman said, irritated, shaking her hair. “Don’t you live around here?”
“Yeah, over by State Street. I think I’ve seen you at Winn-Dixie.”
“Mary Jane, quit sucking your hair,” the woman scolded. “No telling what awful stuff’s in this water. You’ve rescued us,” she told Tubby. “Take us where it’s dry.”
“Maybe Baptist Hospital would be worth a try,” he suggested, not sure he liked this predicament.
“That sounds like a winner,” she said, angry at her fate.
Her rescuer backed the boat out of the boxwoods and into the street. He pointed it toward Napoleon Avenue.
“Lordy, there’s Mr. Melancon,” the woman exclaimed. A man in a checked bathrobe sat atop his roof. Tubby steered that way.
Mr. Melancon had gone up on an aluminum ladder, and he came down the same way, stopping at the water line and waving for the boat to come in closer. He was wearing wet bedroom slippers over wet white socks, and he had not recently shaved. Tubby brought the boat in close, and the old man stepped in and stumbled into the arms of the teenager, who yelped. The boat rocked, and everybody made noises.
“This is all so stupid,” Mr. Melancon griped.
Tubby finally got them positioned. “Off we go again.”
On the way to Napoleon Avenue they passed other stranded people, but five was about all the Lost Lady was rated to carry so Tubby just kept going. He made a tight turn toward the river and Baptist Hospital, still unsure of his depth. They got to the Emergency Entrance but the hospital was in water well up to the first floor and was as deserted as could be.
“I suppose they got all the patients out,” the mother said.
Suddenly there was the sound of breaking glass and a chair sailed through a window six flights up.
A head poked out.
“Send help!” the person cried. “It’s very hot in here!”
“Mom, look, what’s that?” the kid asked, looking into the water.
Tubby followed the pointing finger and saw what appeared to be toes and a nose floating toward them. He gunned his little trawler and hastened away. “The highest ground will be at the levee,” he said sagely.
He was right, but he didn’t have to go all the way to the levee to prove it. Just a few blocks further on, right by one of Tubby’s favorite eateries, Pascal’s Manale, the Lost Lady scraped pavement.
“I guess you’ll have to walk from here,” he told his passengers. “I think I can see dry land ahead at St. Charles Avenue.”
“Maybe we can catch a streetcar,” the lady said bitterly. She got her family and Mr. Melancon over the side into water only about a foot deep. There were blue flashing lights at St. Charles, the signals emitted by welcoming police cars. “Are you coming?” she asked Tubby.
“No, I’m going back,” he told her. Keep your daughter and Mr. Melancon, too. “If those guys are cops, tell them there are people who need help at the hospital.”
He waited until his refugees had splashed out of the flood, and then he used his paddle to shove off. The Lost Lady took him back the way they had come, up Napoleon Avenue. His plan was to make at least one more trip bringing in survivors, ferrying people to solid ground. When he got back to the intersection at Claiborne, however, he saw a gleeful group of wet young men using a street sign to break in the door of the Walgreen’s. He reached into his green bag for his firearm, checked it for water, and placed in on his lap. Tubby was not a believer in guns. He had devoted more than two decades to the law. The speed with which he was now reverting to self-protection surprised even him.
A few minutes later, as he neared his own neighborhood, another boat, a flat-bottomed pirogue better suited for duck hunting in marsh grass, came wobbly out of Cuculu Street manned by two young studs, and it steered right at Tubby.
He opened up the throttle on his motor, but even one enthusiastic paddler could beat him, and the pirogue angled to cut him off.
The boy in front displayed a weapon with a black barrel and a plastic stock that could have been an AK-47 for all Tubby knew. The lawyer showed off his own handgun, pointing it at the sky. The boy on the back seat stopped paddling, and the two boats passed each other, stern looks all around. No words were spoken though Tubby had a few he felt like saying.
He kept an eye on the pirogue as it receded into the distance and cut left onto a side street. They wanted my boat, he thought to himself. He felt a branch scrape the hull. “Heading home,” he said out loud and made a bee-line for his soggy hearth.
That night found Tubby mixing up strange concoctions. Always a fan of inventive New Orleans cuisine, he first tried, then rejected, cold canned mushroom soup mixed with club soda. Inspired by a can of artichoke hearts, he took his time and made a remoulade sauce. He mixed the horseradish from the jar with the mustard and paprika and salad oil, Worstershire sauce, and Crystal hot sauce, and a little vinegar, the black pepper, the white pepper, and he had it. He poured this over his artichokes and ate with satisfaction.
Later, he sat on his upstairs balcony in a rocking chair, trying to sleep while mosquitoes buzzed, cradling his .45 on his lap. Clouds were finally giving way to stars, whole constellations of them. He could see the muses. The City of New Orleans was that dark.
8
Bonner the criminal was as happy as a kid with an ice cream cone when he reached the Broad Street overpass and dragged himself out of the water. First off, there were helpless women and children on the bridge, huddled around small fires and swatting bugs. The couple of men he saw looked old and weak, and they also had clothes that might fit him. Even ragged jeans would serve him better than the orange prison jumpsuit he had on. Anyone with a brain could figure out where he got that. Best of all, there were no cops in sight.
“Howdy ma’am,” he said to one old crone bent over a trash fire with two mournful looking kids sitting beside her.
“Howdy yourself. You got anything to eat?”
“No, I don’t,” Bonner admitted.
“Here’s something if you want it.” She poked a granola bar in Bonner’s face, and he a
ccepted it gratefully.
“Guess I’ll look around,” he said and stood up.
“Ain’t much to see,” she told him.
He walked to the top of the bridge, which spanned Lake Interstate, and down the other side where the roadway sank beneath the flood. Just ahead, though Bonner couldn’t have identified it, was the Melpomene Street Pumping Station No. 1. It was silent as a tomb, its 2.6 million gallon per minute screws under water and powered off for the duration. Bonner noted several other campers. There were about twenty all told, he figured. Nobody was overtly friendly or curious. It was dark. Everybody was wet and miserable. Bonner found a spot by himself and lay down, his back propped against the concrete guard rail. His sleep, occasionally interrupted by helicopters flapping overhead, was fitful.
He woke up hungry. The sun was coming up over the parish prison, and the silhouetted guard towers reminded him of the urgency of travel. The other bridge-dwellers were stirring about. Of course they would notice his clothes, and somebody might have the bravado to say something about it. He wondered which way to go. He watched two kids swim toward him to the overpass. They got out dripping, clutching plastic bags, and walked among the groups of refugees offering cans of Vienna sausages and bags of chips for sale. Bonner shook his head angrily and waved them off. If they could find food, so could he.
