by Tony Dunbar
Bonner Rivette got used to living in the woods, just a convenient hop, skip, and a jump from a dozen blocks of flooded and abandoned houses. They were loaded with food and booze and clothes and he even found a lid of marijuana hidden in a bread box behind a moldy loaf of Arrowhead rye. Of course, he had to slip around patrolling sheriff’s cars and, after about a week, soldiers, but he only went out at night, had no vehicle to mark his presence, and took one small load at a time. He was hard to spot. There was no river traffic, so no one noticed him from the water. He did not know it, but because of downstream hurricane silting, the Mississippi River was closed to navigation. He supposed the occasional helicopters overhead or the passing police car on top of the levee might spot his fire back in the brush, but no one ever came to investigate. His ankle healed, and now that his internal energy was building he felt ashamed at the weakness he had formerly displayed. Had he offended the woodland spirits? He meditated about this to re-secure his place among his pantheon. Nevertheless, even with the spirits present, he was lonesome. Camping out was not getting him closer to realizing his yearnings. He hoped to locate the source of Katrina’s power. It was almost time for the storm to get busy destroying things again.
One morning while Rivette sat meditating by the river, seeking strength from the wind, he heard an unfamiliar noise through the broken stand of willow trees that sheltered his lean-to. He crept to the edge of the woods to investigate. It was the sound of honking cars. He took a chance and sprinted up to the crest of the levee and saw below him a long line of traffic moving down the river road. Individual vehicles peeled off onto the side streets. He quickly dismissed the idea that this was a manhunt for him. What it was, he realized, was the return of the rightful owners of these houses. Something had happened to allow them to come back to Bonner’s world.
This would be the end, he knew, of his wilderness experience. He prepared himself mentally to reengage in his battle with society. It was time for the knight of disruption to return.
He dressed himself for the occasion, in a pair of crisp Dickey work pants he had taken from a laboring man’s closet, pressed neatly by some hard-working wife. Bonner also had a stack of clean T-shirts he could carry in a child’s school backpack. They advertised everything from the Grand Canyon to Blackmon’s Tree Service. He’d found a nice leather shaving kit, loaded with toiletries he could use. He was deficient in, but not without, ID and cash. For the former, he had a Jefferson Parish voter registration which he had found in the drawer of a man’s home-office desk. For cash he had a kid’s piggy bank. He had found it stuffed with nearly fifty dollars worth of coins and tooth fairy money. He also had some old silver dollars, set in Plexiglas squares, but he recognized these as items more valuable sold than spent. And he had some papers he had taken from Tubby Dubonnet’s law office and his handgun.
Bonner carefully washed himself and shampooed his sandy brown hair in a plastic bucket. He shaved himself well.
Everything he needed went into the backpack. Rivette cleaned up his camp by throwing the rest of the stuff he had touched into the river. Pots, pans, the five-gallon paint buckets he had used for chairs, dirty socks, all joined the great flow toward the Gulf of Mexico. He doubted that anyone was actively hunting him for now, what with the overwhelming confusion of the last two weeks, but his mantra was to leave nothing but his footprints behind.
Satisfied that his camp had been erased, he marched over the levee and across the road as if he were a taxpayer, moving quickly to avoid the trucks and trailers of homeowners, men driving, wives looking anxiously out the window, kids fighting in the back, all streaming back to reclaim their simple lives. He hiked up Newman Avenue past houses he had vandalized and nodded to people getting out of their vehicles and assessing their damage for the first time. Out came the ice chests with water and juice. The men were shaking their heads at smashed roofs. The kids were running for the door while mom tried to keep them back.
Jefferson Highway had previously been the outer boundary of his deserted realm. Now it was jammed with cars. The traffic lights still weren’t working, so the scene was a little tense. Many of those behind the wheel had been inching along at ten miles an hour all the way from Baton Rouge or wherever they had been jammed in with family or in-laws, or in motel rooms paid for with maxed-out credit cards, and they were beyond ready to get home. No matter that home might be funky with water or exposed to the weather.
All of the stores and gas stations were boarded up or blown empty as Easter eggs, and Bonner wondered if he might have made his move too quickly. It was all very noisy. He felt a little dizzy. This land looked too barren to support him. He successfully crossed three crowded inbound lanes of cars and trucks and sat down on the curb for a few minutes, considering his next step.
He was in front of a gas station. Its canopy had fallen down and knocked over the pumps. He took a package of hard candies out of his pack and ate a few, enjoying the cherry-red ones best, while he watched the cars bump along. He noticed a man working his way down the grassy median between the two halves of the roadway, sticking signs into the ground. They were small, chessboard-sized, affixed onto wire stands, and the man was putting one in about every ten feet. He had a big stack of them, and he had to keep going back to his car for more.
The signs said, house gutting, followed by a telephone number.
Bonner sensed an opportunity and walked over to see what the man was doing. “You need any help, mister?” he asked.
The man was middle-aged, with a large belly, a big mustache, and hair parted down the middle. He straightened up.
“You want to gut houses?” he asked.
“What’s that mean?” Bonner was curious.
“That’s what you call stripping out all the stuff that got wet. The moldy sheetrock, the furniture, the floors, whatever got flooded.”
“What’s it pay?” Bonner asked.
“Six fifty an hour, all cash,” the man told him, ready to haggle for more.
“That’ll work,” Bonner said. “For starters.”
“You’re hired. You wanna begin now?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. Grab you some of them signs.”
So Bonner had a legitimate job. After putting up all the signs he had to tell the man he had no place to stay, and he saw a flash of doubt cross his employer’s face.
“My apartment’s trashed,” he explained.
“I got a garage you can sleep in. It ain’t fancy, and you wouldn’t have it to yourself. I got some other guys sleeping in there, plus my dogs, and my wife also has her washing machine in it. How long you need a place?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, okay. Let’s see how it works.” The boss was flexible. “I got some more signs to put up around the neighborhood. Then I’ll get you on the job.”
This arrangement suited Bonner Rivette just fine.
19
Gastro had been accepted by Steve’s family at their compound of Jim Walter homes and house trailers south of Myrtle Grove, where their backyard was basically the Gulf of Mexico. And Gastro, since he was a free-thinker and had a literary bent, readily accepted the Oubres, who in better days had survived by catching shrimp and selling magazine subscriptions. Thirteen Oubres and seven of their dogs were in residence upon the three-acre lot, separated from Highway 23 by a fringe of orange trees. Most of them expected to be there only temporarily, until they could get back to see what was left of their estates further south in Port Sulfur, Empire, and Venice, areas so wasted by the hurricane that they had been cordoned off by the military.
Miraculously, no one in the family had died, though Cousin Charles described being blown a mile back into the swamp. His wife had figured he was gone for good until he walked back two days later with most of his hair missing.
None of the Oubres currently had a job, so they had plenty of time to cook, and play cards, and tell stories, and eat and drink. Gastro got to try out shrimp gumbo “with mama’s belt,” blackened shrimp,
“shrimp with lotsa garlic,” and shrimp boudin, since the deep-freeze had to be emptied out.
There was nothing around to steal, Gastro noted, except for the family’s plentiful guns which he did not really know how to use. Truth was, he didn’t want to take anything that belonged to the Oubres. Their mutual affection toward each other and their kindness toward him were all new to him, compared to the two families he had known. There was his own back in Montgomery, featuring Dad the butt-kicker, and there was his street clan, where even his friends didn’t think twice about shafting each other. Gastro was tempted to try to do something nice for the Oubres, but he didn’t know what that would be. He didn’t have much experience being nice.
He took a walk “through the country” with Steve one afternoon for the fresh air and to get a little high.
“Cause no one ain’t gonna test us right now, bro,” Steve said.
“You’ve been tested? I never have,” Gastro boasted.
“Sure. I had a permit to carry a gun in Jefferson Parish, and you got to get tested there. Not here, of course. You don’t get that too bad in Plaquemines Parish unless you work for the tow boat company or offshore. But we’ve always had our own boats and did anything we want so long as we can net the shrimp.”
“What’s with that now?” Gastro was enjoying the calm of the open space back by the levee, where the land met Barataria Bay. There were even a few cows grazing in the sparse grass.
“They say the shrimp is very plentiful now. The hurricane worked the water around good, and the shrimp got lots of what they like to eat. Only we got no boats to catch them with. Everybody’s boat is smashed up or way up on dry ground. Who knows when we’ll get all that straightened out.”
Newly returned seagulls were sprinkled like Fourth of July sparklers in the wide blue sky, turned into silver by the bright sun.
“Your family,” Gastro said haltingly. “They’re nice.”
Steve laughed.
“They think they’re pretty tough. They don’t know about being nice.”
“Okay, whatever. But I think they’re, like, good.”
“They’re okay,” Steve agreed.
Gastro was still thinking about what he might do to benefit the Oubres. “Maybe,” he said, “if we go up to New Orleans, I could score some dope and make some money, and it might help.” He was looking into the muddy black earth when he said those words.
“I don’t know about that,” Steve said. “I might still get called back to work for Mr. Flowers. I wouldn’t want to mess that up.”
They walked on a little further.
“Right there’s where the levee broke,” Steve said, explaining the mud flat spreading out before them.
There was an old black man sitting on the levee and watching the birds overhead. He had on dirty khaki pants and torn sneakers, and he had a brown paper bag with a bottle in it between his knees.
“Hello, Mr. Plauche,” Steve said cordially.
Mr. Plauche invited them closer with a wave of his hand. Steve introduced his friend.
“It’s a good day for thinking,” Mr. Plauche said.
“We’re mostly just walking around,” Steve replied.
“I’ve been thinking about the past,” Mr. Plauche said. “The hurricane stirred that up. You need to go back and remember sometimes.”
“Yes, sir. I’m sure that’s true,” Steve said. He ran his fingers through his red hair and looked up at the sky.
“You see that there?” Mr. Plauche indicated a crooked fruit tree growing out of the base of the levee quite close to the gorge the storm surge had carved out. Now it was almost dry.
“Right there used to be a Negro cemetery. Right under that levee. I’d say a hundred people was buried in there.”
“Is that a fact? What happened to all of them?”
“Some of their bones has washed away I expect,” Mr. Plauche said. He looked into the bottle that was inside the brown paper bag, but he didn’t take a sip. “Some of them is probably there right now. And I think that’s why the levee broke here.”
“Because they built the levee on a graveyard? You mean a curse?” Steve wasn’t really humoring the man—he respected curses.
“Yes, a curse. That graveyard and the church what used to be here was stolen, don’t you see, from the people who lived here. It was stolen by the Ortegas when they changed all of the land records and claimed this land for themselves so they could sell it to the government.”
“I always heard they stole it.”
“They sure did steal it! The sheriffs moved the colored people out, and they didn’t get anything for their land. And the government bulldozed that church and the cemetery and the people’s houses and built that levee right there.”
“Maybe it really was a curse then,” Gastro said, following the story.
“Sure it was. And more than that. It was weak soil. There was graves and bodies all up under in there. Of course the levee couldn’t stand. It just had to wash out where all those old graves were.”
They all studied the crater solemnly.
“Yep, right there’s where they were,” Mr. Plauche said.
Tubby’s warm glow from his Jackson vacation lasted for about two days. He made it back to his house without too much trouble. Of course, it took four hours to drive from Hammond to New Orleans because of all the people trying to return to their homes in the adjoining parishes and because of all the military convoys. He had to wait in the traffic like everybody else, but when he got back to the city there was only him and the roadblock at River Road to contend with. Alert National Guardsmen were checking everybody’s identification, and turning most of the people around.
When it came his turn, Tubby showed his National Guard pass to the military and tried to look like a first responder. The nineteen-year-old soldier, rifle slung over his shoulder, handed the paper back and waved him through.
A little bit of progress was apparent in that some chain saws were at work opening up St. Charles Avenue. Tubby drove to his house and found that Hope had cleared his front yard and packed about ten black garbage bags full of branches. The tree was still there, but the lawn was now visible under the trunk. In fact, she was working there when he arrived, sweating, heavy breasts heaving, in one of his eracism T-shirts, working a pair of loppers. She brushed her hair back with her hand when he drove up, and smiled.
Tubby got out of the truck and hugged her. It was an instinctive thing to do. These days he wanted to hug everybody, and her earthy fragrance suited his back-from-the-road tiredness very well.
“I brought you a present,” he said, and got the case of wine out of the truck.
“Oh. You’ve been shopping,” she said happily.
“The best of Wal-Mart,” he said. “And here’s the other stuff you ordered.” He handed her a plastic bag full of feminine supplies.
“Why, thank you, sir,” she said demurely.
It was almost like they were married, but without the sex. Or, as Tubby remembered the last part of his marriage, it was almost like they were married.
That night he cooked Wal-Mart T-bone steaks on the grill. Instead of charcoal, he used pecan branches from one of the fallen trees down the block. He and Hope powered up the radio, and, after tiring of the Katrina news on United Radio, found a country music station out of Shreveport. They drank some Wal-Mart California chardonnay, and listened to the flushed-quail sound of the occasional helicopter, red lights blinking, zipping overhead.
There were no mosquitoes, which was unnatural because it was very warm. The diners moved as little as possible to avoid overheating on the sultry night.
“I just heard a cricket,” Tubby said.
She listened. There it came again. The meek return of nature, to a habitat that had been very unfriendly of late.
“The first critter to return,” she said. “It must be a little loony.”
“I imagine its friends will be along in a day or two,” Tubby said. He took a nip and looked up at the stars.
<
br /> “I can’t remember ever seeing the Big Dipper before, not from here,” he said.
“Which one is it?”
“That one.” He pointed. “Here, I’ll show it to you.”
He knelt beside her, reclined in the wrought-iron arm chair, and guided her finger toward the North Star.
“See, follow that one up this way,” He raised her hand high above with his own, and suddenly had to bend over and kiss her.
“Umm,” she coughed. “The wine went down wrong. Wait, don’t stop.”
She put her hand on the back of Tubby’s head and pulled it down to hers.
“How romantic can this be,” she said, coming up for air. “Two flood victims.”
“Two flood victims all alone in a formerly grand but now empty city.”
“Cast adrift.”
“And only themselves. No one else around.”
