Her mother shouted, speed-walking behind them as he hauled Cora up the stairs and down the long hall, out onto the upstairs gallery where the sun sprang off the tin and past the old servants’ quarters. Unclipping his keys from his belt loop, he unlocked his studio and opened the door.
It had been so long since she’d been invited up there, she’d forgotten what it looked like. The walls were pasted with sketches of wiry trees and angry imaginary women furnished with her mother’s mouth or nose, while the tables and chairs overflowed with half-finished things—an armless nude, a dog with pinned-back ears and log legs. Her mother had stopped in the doorway as if there was a force field there, but her father suddenly didn’t seem to care if she saw these things that had been off-limits, not for public consumption, her whole entire life. He yanked on her wrist, pulled her through.
“Dad?” He was fumbling with the steel door that led to the attic, and she didn’t like any of this. Didn’t like that he wasn’t saying anything. Didn’t like being here. She didn’t like that he seemed to want to bring her to the windowless attic, where she wouldn’t be able to keep her eye on the weather. The very thought made the skin prickle on her spine.
“Joe!” her mother shouted from outside, but he had the attic door open. He was going through. He was crouching in front of the gun safe in the dark. “I don’t like this, Joe!”
“Come in here, Cora.”
She shook her head, aware she probably looked to him like a three-year-old child.
“Come. In. Here.”
She came.
“If you want to be foolish, you will at least learn how to protect yourself.”
“Scaring her is not going to work, Joe!” From the gallery, her mother was shouting. “We don’t have time for games. Already, the traffic—”
“Forty-five. Twenty-five. Twenty-three,” he said. “Cora!”
She looked at his hand, clawed around the knob of the combination lock.
“Repeat it.”
“Forty-five. Twenty-five. Twenty-three.”
“Forty-five right, twenty-five left, twenty-three right.” He spun the dial, and then there was her mother’s father’s old duck gun.
ABOVE THE TOO-STILL branches of the oaks, the sky was turning green like a frying oyster, and the truck was gone. Her parents were gone. Papie was gone. Everyone was gone or going, the city’s noise fading as fewer cars sped to the bottlenecks, as the hammering stopped, the shops shut, as those who stayed took a last look at the sky before battening down to drink and wait. Everybody was so sure it would come, but storms didn’t like to be caught in the trawl nets of probability the forecasters threw. It was their nature, Cora thought, to flout our science, to laugh at our attempts at order. Still, she had to go home and clear out her fridge and pack her most valuable things to bring them to the big house, where there were more places to hide.
She rolled down the windows of the Jeep to let the wind run its fingers through her hair. The shadows of the oaks caressed her car. She breezed through the lights at the empty intersections and under the interstate that was holding all the cars, the frightened people, the panting dogs, the birds in cages, the overnight bags, the family photos, wedding silver, flat-screen TVs, and frozen redfish up to the heavens like an offering. The air shimmered with burning fuel.
On her block, Mr. Franklin’s broken-down Buick was the only car left, and nobody was out on their porches. The only soul in sight, a man walking towards the corner, turned around as she stepped out of the Jeep.
“Cora! Yo!” It was Troy from the restaurant. He jogged towards her, wearing his guest face. “Damn, I’m glad to see you, baby.”
“What’s up?” she asked.
His hand swirled in the air, conjuring her porch ceiling, the green sky, the smudge of dark cloud out beyond the I-10. “I came looking for you. You leaving?”
She made a face.
“No? They’re saying mandatory on the news now. You didn’t hear Nagin?”
“I’m’na start listening to him now?” She laughed. “Nah, I’m going to go stay by my parents’. Better pantry. You’re not going?”
“I’ve been trying to find a way—” His eyes darted to her face, then up again at the sky. “My aunt and Anthony and them lit out this morning, and I can’t find out anything about buses.”
“What about your sister?” She cast about in the air for her name, saw only the tall woman sitting cross-legged in the middle of Troy’s floor, flipping through magazines in her hospital scrubs. “The nurse?”
“Reyna?” Troy looked at her like she’d lost it, she had no idea why.
“She left?”
He shrugged. “She doesn’t have a car.”
“Still, though. She’s got little kids, right?”
“They’re at summer camp.” He looked at the toes of his shoes for a second, tapped one against the cement. “Shit, Cora—”
“I heard the Superdome’s taking people,” she said quickly, then tried to turn it into a joke, “—if you’re scared.”
He kept staring at his shoes. “I tried that once before. That’s not any kind of place.”
When she looked at him, she saw roofs caving in under the weight of water. She didn’t like seeing him scared—the man had a face like a mountainside. When Chef was bitching like they’d all be murdered if they didn’t get out of the weeds and fast, she used Troy as cover, but now his eyes were jumping from her face to the Jeep and back again, and she was scared of an avalanche. She started shaking her head. She really didn’t want him to ask. Since she and Nemetz had decided sex was too much for her—three years of abstinence and counting—she’d had a hard time being alone with him, with those broad hands that were so good at touching, with that back that mantled over her like a protective shell.
“Want to come in where it’s air-conditioned?” She motioned to her house. “I was just going to grab a few things.”
She unlocked the door. The couch creaked as he took his usual place on it. Normally when he waited for his lift to work, she babbled, he laughed, he joked, she hit him, playful as you can only be with people you used to fuck, but now it seemed like neither of them could think of anything to say. The TV popped on, popped off. Cora folded dresses, skirts, her best tops into the hampers, hangers and all.
“You don’t think you can stay in your house?” she called out to him.
She could hear him shaking his head. Off the bookshelf, she pulled the journal she’d kept the year she’d tried to live away at college, opened it, began to read a page—who want to touch you with their hot hands, all the rinsed pasta and plastic dressings, all the drones in professor suits—
“You aren’t staying in yours,” he was saying, “and I don’t care if there’s caviar and foie in your mama’s pantry, that’s not why.”
— a play they put on to try to convince you what’s “real” is real.
“You know how deep it got down here in Betsy? This place used to be a swamp, baby. Should’ve stayed a swamp.”
“But this ain’t Betsy, baby,” she said, putting the journal back on the shelf. “We’re not gonna flood. It’ll turn and we’ll just get blown a little.” She picked up the hamper. “They always turn.”
Troy came into the doorway, and as he put his arms out for the hamper, she saw his face—his brow weighing on his eyes, his mouth dragged down by invisible sinkers.
“You don’t know the first thing about it.” He thrust out his chin. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“I was seven years old in ’65, and I remember paddling out of there like yesterday. You don’t want to take your chances with a storm like this.”
She took a deep breath and tried to calculate his age. Forty-two years old. She’d met his grown-up daughter and his forty-year-old sister who queened around like Phylicia Rashad in shiny satins, but it had never occurred to her to think of him that way, to think of his experience. She trotted behind him while he hauled her things to the car and told herself a
gain how, tomorrow after the storm had changed course, they’d go to the restaurant for a drink. Bobby would laugh while the ice crashed up and down in his Boston shaker, while Troy hunched in the shadowed corner, holding her father’s axe.
“SO YOU’RE THE kind of person lives in this kind of house,” Troy said as he stepped into the heavy cool of her parents’ front hall. “I had a dream once I lived in one of those mansions in the Garden District. There were dogs in every room, big dogs I had to bribe with Snickers bars every time I wanted to pass.”
“This isn’t the Garden District,” she said.
“No shit,” he grunted. “Nah, the rich people around here’re even longer dead.”
She wished she hadn’t invited him. All she’d wanted was to be alone. Now, Troy was looking at the house the way she’d seen him watch a seagull once when they were smoking outside the kitchen, all mouth-open, uneducated awe. She wanted to elbow him, tell him you were supposed to pretend you saw glorious shit every day, but the way his eyes followed the crown molding as it looped across the ceiling in sweeps of cypress made her see it new. At every joint, the plasterer had made mud into a silk ribbon, crinkling and neatly bowed, all of it lifelike but pale as the faded sculpture of the Greeks.
She was up on her toes trying to shoot the bolts on the front doors. “Hey!” she said. He turned towards her, slow as molasses. “Help me with this.”
He dropped his bag and laid a hand on her waist to move her aside, and she stepped away from it, but not before she’d felt a blush bloom across her skin. She and Dr. Nemetz had figured out that it was too hard for her, in a sexual relationship, to know where she stopped and the other person began, but that didn’t stop her wanting; instead, desire appeared out of nowhere, apparently at random.
She breathed Troy in as he reached up to wiggle the bolt into its notch. She liked his smell, like cloves in rendered fat, and it calmed her a little bit. Out of the corners of his eyes he looked at her, then brought his arm down and wrapped it around her shoulder. Whenever he hugged her—sneaking up behind her in the walk-in or drunk at Pal’s after a shift—she felt overtaken, and usually she fluttered away like a spooked pigeon. Now, though, she thought it might be nice to have him take over.
She leaned into his chest, let her legs go slack. “I’m glad you came to find me.”
His body straightened and relaxed. He danced her two steps backwards into the house, and when he let her go, he picked up his bag and followed her up the stairs.
“How’d your daddy afford a place like this?”
She felt her mother behind her, hands on hips—A lady never talks about money—and it was like she was in one of those stiff dresses Tess insisted be buttoned up to the neck.
“It’s her money,” she said. “Her daddy was in oil and gas.”
“My oh my.”
“Well, son of a bitch drank most of it, and we lost half the rest in the crash,” Cora tugged at the neck of her T-shirt. “Besides, this place was a real shithole when we moved in. Had been a boarding house. There were holes in the roof, rusty old bathtubs. It was built way back when we were still France—or Spain maybe, I don’t know—by a free man of color. He built the next door house too, but it was torn down.”
Troy’s fingers traced the upright grooves and viney swirls carved into the newel post. “Your granddaddy makes furniture too, right?”
“Used to.”
She ducked into her mother’s bathroom to fill the tub with emergency water, and when she came out again, Troy was leering at her room as if he saw her teenage self in there, unbuttoning her monogrammed school blouse, unzipping her plaid skirt.
“That’s my room,” she said.
He turned around to her with a big grin and made like to throw his bag backwards onto her bed. She crossed her arms over her chest and made a harrumphing noise, but he could never really be shut down. He still waited on her front steps to be invited in after their shift, still put his hands on her when he found her at the drinks station. Two months ago, at Bobby’s party, he’d started unzipping his fly in the hall, and she’d had to elbow him in the ribs.
“This isn’t a quid pro quo me giving you shelter,” she said. “You can stay for free.”
His face cracked open, then shut tight again. His phone was buzzing in his back pocket, and his hand moved, reluctantly, to pick it up.
“Reyna,” he said into the phone. “It’s about to be too late to change your mind.”
Cora was close enough to him that she could hear most of his sister’s answer: something about meaning what she said, something about Troy finding an evacuation car.
“Nah, I found a friend, I’m over by her place,” he said, his face closed up, holding something back.
You nasty man. Reyna’s voice came loud through the phone as she laughed the funny hooting laugh Cora remembered from the last time they’d met, when she had given Cora and Troy a ride home from a deb party they’d catered. Cora liked her—she seemed to live her life at full throttle, singing loud along with the radio as she punched the old Thunderbird through yellow lights, her hair an unmoving helmet in the wind.
“You should get out of here, Reyna, you really should,” Troy said, in a stern, condescending voice like the one Cora’s parents reserved for her. “This is not going to be pretty.”
Through the phone came the word Charity then children in this city then You think I don’t know from ugly?
“No, no, Rey, that’s not what I’m saying.”
Then don’t say it, she responded, and then said something else, something muffled, that Cora didn’t pick up.
Troy’s face changed—melted, as if it had suddenly lost all muscle tone. “That’s not Willy, is it, Reyna?”
Cora couldn’t hear her respond.
“ ‘That’s not Willy?’ I asked you. I thought they were at camp, Reyna! You told me they were at camp!”
“The little boys?” Cora whispered.
Listen, we’re fine here, Troy, stop worrying, Reyna said, her voice raised high, then dropped low as she talked about locks, about water.
“I’m coming to get y’all,” Troy said. “Just hang tight. I’ll be there in fifteen.”
There’s no place to go, Troy, Reyna shouted. You know damn well there is not a single place—
Troy snapped the phone shut like a clam in his palm, and in the quiet, beyond the boarded windows, they could hear the wind beginning to kick up, leaves and loose boards rattling.
“She’s got her kids with her?” Cora asked. “We can go get them—we’ve got plenty room.”
Troy turned away from her towards the disapproving portrait of Imogene Marleybone.
“You don’t want her here,” Troy said.
“Why not?” She looked down at Del’s bedside table, cleared of all the hair ties, pencils, art books Del used to keep there. Del would be plugged into the TV in New York, fretting about her, she was sure, the same way Troy was fretting about his sister. “I had a good time talking with her when she picked us up from that cater gig Carnival time. She seemed cool.”
“Seemed,” Troy said.
Cora clicked on the lamp, but the bulb had burned out. She clicked it off. Reyna had been on her way home from a ball, wearing this long gold dress and black eyeliner that made her look like an Egyptian goddess, and Cora had looked at her own face in the rearview mirror, thought how much they resembled each other. Hoped that she’d look that good in ten years.
“What happened to her car?” Cora asked.
“That was the river pilot’s car.” He clucked his tongue, looking into the distance like he was remembering something. “Back when she was with the river pilot.” He lifted his bag up onto Del’s bed. “She’s in Calliope, Reyna. They’ll be fine.”
“Calliope? I thought she was a nurse.”
Troy shrugged. “You said the storm would turn.”
Landfall
August 29
Cora lay across Troy’s body on the kitchen floor, trying to rename the storm
’s sounds. It was a freight train lumbering. An old man’s moans. The big bad wolf’s huff and puff, his howl.
She was sticky, her mouth and her thighs. Naked and drunk, like Troy snoring under her, his head on a chair cushion. When the rain started, he’d been dancing in front of the stove, licking béchamel off a wooden spoon, until she took the spoon away. She was feeling every raindrop fall like it was falling on her head, like the bullets that rained from the sky on New Year’s Eve, so she put the milky spoon down on the counter, wrapped her hands around Troy’s wrists and worked them up under her shirt, staring into his pecan eyes as she did.
He shook, Troy. Every time she put her mouth on him—on the padded bones of his pelvis, on his rib cage, on his cock—he flinched, shuddered. Soon, she was able to stop thinking, and she let the little sparks he lit on her neck, her inner thighs, spread until she was on fire. She pretended that this fire was what was making all the noise. But her body had eventually grown cold, and now she could hear the rain again.
You scared? he’d asked her, but scared wasn’t it. Scared you ran, you hid, but she was still there. They say a deer on a night road will stand transfixed by headlights, that he’ll just let the car come. Now that the storm was here, working over them like a huge engine, she understood the deer’s wisdom. The world would do what it would do to you; what you did didn’t change a thing.
Something hit the house with a twang—metal, bending as it hit, then another something driven against the driveway side. She stood up, and the house began to sway on its foundation, or maybe she was swaying. She reached for the counter. It was like being chained in the hold of a ship that someone else was sailing, some homicidal asshole of a captain.
She looked down at Troy. His eyes were open.
“I’m going out,” she said.
“Don’t tempt, girl.”
Like being chained in the dark all the way across the Atlantic, everything black, especially the new world you’re headed to.
“No, I’ve got to,” she said. “Got to see it. See about it.”
Troy put hands to the ground and pushed himself up. “Not by yourself, you’re not.”
The Floating World Page 18