“Hey, look!”
Kevin pointed to Julian’s bobber, which bounced in the water while the tug at the line ripped wide shimmying circles across the surface.
“Grab it!”
Julian, who had been leaning back against the rock, jumped up on his feet. He grabbed the rod while the line loosened, the bobber trailed farther out into the water, and the crank of the reel spun. It was a good, solid strike. Not a big fish, but it had an impressive pull.
He let the line go a little slack, then cranked it in tighter to set the hook.
“By God I think you got that sucker!” Kevin stood next to him, grinning. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you knew what you were doing.”
He worked with the catch for minutes, reeling it in, letting it run, then reeling again. Stepping down on the bank closer to the water, bare feet tracking the grit of rock and sand, he repeated it over again as sweat beaded on his forehead and his heart raced.
Kevin’s eyes opened wide, gleeful as a child’s. “Damn! The little son of a gun wants to give you a fight.”
Julian bit his bottom lip as the rod bowed with the tension. I’ve got him hooked. If I can just outlast him, he’s mine.
And then he saw his father’s eyes light up like the blaze of sun that flashed through the live oak leaves above. “Just hold on,” Simon was telling him, as he had before. “He’s already yours, you just gotta fight to keep him.”
Sometimes that’s the hardest thing. Holding on to keep what you’ve got.
With a splash, something broke the surface of the water. Julian slowly reeled in the catch. The line much shorter now, Julian lifted the rod, smiling the way he had when he was twelve, as a catfish, no bigger than his hand but feisty with life, twitched and danced and dangled in the late summer light.
18
By mid October, the city of New Orleans, like a prizefighter pummeled and pressed to the mat, strained to raise its head from an unconscious, near-death state. Its pulse, though faint, was steady, its prognosis in doubt, and even the struggle back to its knees would be long and arduous. Six weeks after the biggest disaster it had ever seen, a stream of residents, armed with faith, hope, and whatever courage they could muster, still flowed in daily to face an uncertain future in the city that had broken their hearts.
But while the city crawled to life, every hour news stations reported stories of struggle and tragedy as the death tally spilled beyond the flooded city’s limits—infirm or elderly citizens, ferried to outposts of safety in distant towns survived the storm and flood, only to die in Houston, or Atlanta, or Dallas or dozens of other places, from lack of critical medicine or some long standing illness worsened by heartbreak. And even some who were healthy when they left perished as their bodies buckled under the shock of tragedy and the load of loss.
But stories of impossible survival and answered prayers softened the hearts of the most hardened cynics: a three-year-old boy, helicoptered out of harm’s way and leaving his tearful father behind, reunited with him after weeks alone and lost in a shelter in Colorado; an unlikely pair—a five-year-old black girl and her white, eighty-nine-year-old wheelchair-bound neighbor—braved three harsh nights on an overpass before being transported to safety, a journey that involved three cities and nearly every known mode of transportation.
For days Julian had poured over these happy-ending stories in the online edition of the Times-Picayune in the computer room of the Best Western, still holding on to hope. As much as his mind worked to accept Simon’s death, his heart could not, and would not until he had proof. Each TV news dispatch, radio story or newspaper photo cut line of a happy reunion bubbled in him like a tonic, so he combed the pages one by one, praying to find a story of a seventy-six-year-old black man, maybe wearing a brown straw hat, with or without a big leather Bible and carrying a hand-carved African cane.
Standing in front of a bar in the Faubourg Marigny section of the city, a rock’s throw from the French Quarter, Julian watched the fading light of the October sky and thought about those stories. Anything was possible in this bizarre netherworld that had replaced his hometown on the other side of the nightmare. He looked at Grady standing next to him, lighting up, then taking a long drag on his cigarette. Grady was the only man he knew who could smoke like a fiend and still play the hell out of the trumpet. And though Julian had never smoked a cigarette in his life, he thought of asking him for one. There was something about the comfort it seemed to bring, like a child’s pacifier, that looked appealing.
“Don’t even think about smoking these things, man,” Grady eyed him as if he’d read his mind. “I thought I was done with them but since all this mess happened…”
He let the unfinished sentence dangle in the drift of the breeze from the river. Julian gave him an understanding look, then glanced down at his watch.
“So you told them eight, right?”
“Yep.”
“So you sure Little D’s coming?”
“Little D. Yeah.”
He nodded, looked at his watch again. “Easy Money, too?”
Grady tossed his cigarette on the ground and smashed it with his foot. “Quit worrying, man. They’ll be here. Every one of ’em said they would. Don’t forget, don’t none of the clocks in this town work anymore.”
“Besides,” he added, “I told ’em what the gig pays.”
Julian nodded. They had only been waiting a little while and it was only a little past eight. The autumn sky still held faint traces of blue, the shadows lengthening on the street. Wood and glassfronted shops on Frenchmen Street—a hookah bar, a tattoo parlor, a coffee house, a tiny café/deli, more than a few night clubs and other small businesses—stood mostly in shadow like hollowed ruins. On a normal weekday night, music would have blasted from every other doorway while college-age kids, musicians, and a few hip locals and tourists streamed from the bars and milled in the streets, their laughter a tickle in the air, pulsing with a rhythm of its own. A brass band might be tuning up to jam. A jazz trio from one of the colleges might be setting up for a late set, or a guitarist might sit crosslegged on the sidewalk, playing some good Texas blues for tips. But on a street that had once been the pulse point of the city’s music scene, every noise that resembled the sound of pleasure had been drowned by the flood.
A man in his twenties cruised by on a ten-speed bike, and three girls in shorts and tank tops, no doubt volunteers from some distant city, walked by. One of them, the youngest-looking one, with shoulder-length brown hair and freckles, stopped and asked Grady for a cigarette. He fished in his pocket and offered her his pack.
“Where y’all young ladies from?”
A tall blond girl wearing a red baseball cap smiled. “We came down from St. Louis.”
They were members of a United Methodist Church group who had come to help gut houses in St. Bernard Parish.
Grady smiled. “Long way from home.”
“We drove all night,” she said. “Got a light?” The younger girl held the cigarette up to her lips.
“Oh, here you go.” Grady found his matches and lit one.
The girls had come to the city when they read an article in the Post-Dispatch about one of their church member’s relatives, whose newly built house in St. Bernard had taken on eight feet of water. They’d gotten permission to miss a week of classes to help with the friend’s house and others in the neighborhood.
The third member of the group, a brown-skinned girl with a round face, a silver nose ring, and a puffy Afro highlighted with blue dye, joined in the conversation. “I like it down here,” she said. “I think I might come back and stay longer, when things get better.”
An SUV full of young people who clearly knew the church trio pulled up alongside them. “We’re gonna go find some food!” one of the girls in the vehicle yelled out. The three girls said goodbye to Julian and Grady and got in.
Grady and Julian waved as they pulled away. Before they reached the corner Grady yelled to them, “Thank y’all for coming d
own to help!”
“Well, at least somebody thinks this place is worth bothering with.” Grady reached in his pocket for another cigarette. “You wouldn’t believe all what I been hearing, man, stuff about the city never coming back, or coming back with none of us in it. Crazy.” He shook his head.
“Maybe Cindy’s right,” he said. “Maybe it’s not worth trying to make it here.”
“Hey, come on, man. Sure it is.” Julian’s words tumbled out like a reflex, but landed without conviction. He wasn’t at all sure he believed them. The truth was, he’d been so consumed with Simon, Silver Creek, Velmyra, and even Parmenter, that he’d thought little lately about the future of this place where he had been born and raised.
“I don’t know, man.” Grady shifted his weight to one foot and leaned a hand against one of the posts supporting the wrought iron balcony above. “You know what they’re saying up in Texas? Dude told my wife he heard the city was dead. All gone.” He shrugged. “I ain’t gonna lie, I thought the same thing myself, a time or two. It’s like one of those disaster flicks, where the dude knows the world is over, like, everybody’s done for and he’s the last dude on earth, but he still goes around searching for food.”
Grady looked at Julian. “But you wanna stop the guy and ask him, ‘Why?’”
Julian nodded thoughtfully at the movie analogy, a comparison he’d made himself just a couple of days ago. Why? It was a question he’d asked himself every day as he prayed for good news about Simon. Giving up just wasn’t in his blood; he’d figured out it felt… unnatural. But keeping on—hoping—that was a natural thing. Hope. Maybe it was something that folks were just born with, the real proof that you were alive. It’s what his grandfather’d had, for sure, and no doubt his daddy too. And it was the only thing that kept him going now, searching for Simon.
Grady lifted his head back and blew a long, slow stream of smoke up toward the balcony. “What do you think, bruh? You think this place can come back?”
Julian turned up the collar of his shirt as a cool breeze floated by. He looked out toward the outlines of buildings and sky across the street where he’d spent many a summer evening hanging out, playing his horn. He felt a slight chill as he imagined the most dire predictions coming true. Did he? Really?
“Guess we gotta believe so.”
A silver van pulled up to the front of the building and a stocky white man with a full salt-and-pepper beard got out, his keys jangling. “Sorry guys,” he said. “Been waiting long?”
“Hey! Man! You made it!” Grady grabbed the man’s hand and shook it. They had only gotten there fifteen minutes ago, Grady told him. “Hey, thanks a lot for letting us use your place.”
The man, Charley Graviere, had owned the small bar for seventeen years, and had hired the band often. “Charley’s Sweet Spot,” like many of the businesses along the street, had not suffered flood damage but was still closed, since few of the employees had returned, and those who had tried couldn’t find a place to stay.
Fifteen minutes or so after Charley unlocked the door, the musicians of the Soul Fire Brass Band began to arrive and crowded into the wood-paneled, slightly musty space. Grady was right. Every one of them showed up.
They all had been fairly close when Julian was with the band, but two of the guys, Dereek Bradford, trombonist, and bass drummer Thaddeus “Easy Money” Church, had been among his closest friends during his dues-paying days of marching bands, second-line parades, and jazz funerals. Yet they had given him as much grief as the others had the night he announced his departure, not so much with words but snide grunts and cold, silent stares.
Of all the men, the one he most regretted disappointing was Dereek, the youngest in the group, who’d been in his late teens when Julian had played with them, and had shadowed Julian like a fawning little brother. When he’d phoned Dereek to say goodbye, his young friend had never returned his call. And when he dropped Easy Money a postcard from New York—Come on up, you always got a place to stay—he’d never heard back.
But this was no time for holding grudges—they had bigger things on their mind than whatever ax they had to grind with him. Each one had lost his home to flood water, and three had lost their instruments. But Parmenter, generous in death, had provided for the purchase of new instruments for those who needed them. It had taken Grady three days to locate and contact all of them—some had been scattered across the country as far away as California, New Mexico, and even Massachusetts.
They all shook hands with Julian, some grabbing him in a bear hug—Thanks for the gig, man!—and the warm reception was a relief. In minutes, cases and instruments—trumpets, trombones, drums, a sax, a slightly tarnished sousaphone—lay strewn about the room, and the men ran through the standard New Orleans funeral and second-line music quickly. The minute they began to play, the music exploded, and Julian remembered: there was nothing like the sound of a New Orleans brass band. Thick, raucous, hot and free, with a life of its own. It pounded the walls of the small room, bursting it at the seams and spilling into the street.
After an hour or so, they adjourned to one of the few reopened bars about a block away. Once inside The Spotted Cat, already high on the music, they ordered a round of beers and shared flood stories.
Casey’s tale of being trapped on the balcony of his apartment for forty-eight hours paled next to what they heard from the others. Dereek had watched the rolling sea from his rooftop for five days after sleeping in on the morning of the levee breach and waking to water floating his bed. The snare drummer, Claude Joubert, swam through neck-high currents to rescue his cousins from a burning house, only to bring them back to the dubious safety of his boiling hot rooftop, where they waited two days for the sweet music of U.S. Coast Guard helicopter blades. And Easy Money, the diminutive postal worker, silenced the table with his story of trudging miles through a river of oil, waste, and slime up to his chest and making a makeshift raft out of a mattress to rescue four elderly women from the brackish waters of his drowned neighborhood.
Once away from the flooded city, all had watched the tragedy play out on the TV screens of spare bedrooms, shelters, and church basements around the country. As the men talked, the noise level rose with the alcohol levels in their blood. There was so much anger, so much that needed to be said, as the winds of betrayal had blown powerfully from every direction. The mayor. The governor. The president. The heads of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who had bungled the aftermath of the flood, and for days had turned a blind eye to the chaos in the city. The Army Corps of Engineers, architects of the poorly built levees that had been ignored for decades by uniformed commanders whose chests bulged with bars and stripes.
All had let them down, then passed the blame from one to the other like a Christmas fruitcake. The blame was so abundant it would have taken the bandsmen days to dispense it fairly, but after a couple of therapeutic hours of drinking and venting, the men breathed easier, their joints loosened, their nerves calmed. Bonded by the music and the memories of growing up in the city, they reminisced and even laughed and joked as the dark closed in, the wood paneling holding the comforting scent of stale beer, a precious sign of normalcy in an abnormal world.
Miraculously, none of the other men had suffered the loss of loved ones, but all fell silent when Grady brought up the subject of “Pops,” their nickname for Simon. “I sure will miss him, man.” Easy Money looked over at Julian, bowed his head in reverence. Simon had fed them many a late night after gigs; sometimes, after a parade with his buddies in the Elegant Gents, Simon would open his door to find seven or eight pairs of young legs stretched across the furniture in his living room. As if that were his cue, he’d reach deep into a cabinet, grab his best iron pot, and start up the stove, still whistling “When the Saints Go Marching In.” When one of the boys, knowing how much Simon loved Louis Armstrong, had called him “Pops,” the name stuck—Simon loved nothing more than sharing a namesake with the greatest jazzman the city had ever produced.
; When the evening wore on into the next morning, the men got ready to head back to their motels; the funeral was only a few hours away. When Julian headed to his car, Dereek called out to him.
“Hey! Wait a minute.”
He caught up with Julian just before he got into his car.
“So sorry, man,” he said. “About your daddy.”
“Thank you.”
“Hey, look. If there’s anything I can do.”
“Yeah, thanks, man.”
He put his hands in his pockets, looked up toward the sky, then leveled his gaze at Julian. “I was pretty pissed at you when you left, you know.”
“I know. I don’t much blame you.”
“I just want to say that, you know, it’s OK. I get it now. I get why you left.”
Julian’s heart sank. He knew what his old friend was saying.
He looked Dereek in the eye. “No, man. I love this place. This is home. I just…at the time, I just had to get away. To try something new.”
Dereek nodded, looked across the street at the vacant buildings. “I know. Everybody got to do his own thing, right?”
Julian clapped his friend on the shoulder. “How you making it, man? You dealing with everything OK?”
Dereek told him again about his last day in the Ninth Ward house he’d grown up in, which, having lasted through four previous generations in his family, was swallowed in minutes by the flood. When the helicopter’s rescue basket lifted him high above the neighborhood, he had looked down at the horror. As he rose higher, so did the water, it seemed, engulfing the house as it collapsed and floated in the current, disappearing from view. He knew his house and every other house of the block would not survive this. The world he’d known was gone.
Wading Home Page 23
