Someone had broken the lock on the door to Reyna’s entryway. It hung open, letting a strip of daylight into the otherwise dark hall. They climbed the stairs, listening, but they were alone. Troy knocked on Reyna’s door.
“Reyna! It’s Troy, come to pick you up!”
From the way his voice sounded, bouncing off of the stairway’s hard surfaces, Cora knew already that there was no one inside. As soon as he rammed his shoulder into the door, the door yawned open. Troy called out again, but the apartment was obviously empty. The six locks on the back of the door—a chain, three dead bolts, a slide bolt and the knob’s lock—were all undone.
“Reyna?” Troy called a last time. No answer.
In the kitchen, sandwich makings were spread out on the counter—peanut butter, a slimy cold-cut box, mustard and mayo jars, the wrappers from a package of Velveeta squares. The refrigerator door hung open, and its dank interior was littered with half-full juice boxes and cartons of milk, a tub of cream cheese, a bunch of limp celery.
“They left,” Cora said. “I guess they found a ride or something?”
Troy didn’t respond. He walked towards the bedrooms, one done up in yellow on yellow flowers, the other in blue stripes on blue. Clothes—T-shirts and winter coats, socks, a single child’s sneaker, a package of Underoos—were laid out neatly on the floor of the blue room. Cora bent over and picked up the package of underwear, little boys’ Superman briefs, size three.
“They’re so little—” She looked up, but Troy had left the room.
In the bathroom, Troy had opened the medicine cabinet and was throwing its contents into the sink. He didn’t speak until he found what he was looking for, an amber prescription bottle, which he opened, then shut, before ripping the whole cabinet from the wall. It crashed into the bathtub, the mirrored door cracking from top to bottom.
“Stupid bitch!” he yelled, and the building’s silence swallowed it up. “Stubborn, goddamn, stupid, fucking bitch!”
Cora backed into the hall. He shook the golden bottle in his blanched fingers.
“You think it’s a good thing she left?”
Cora looked away from him—at the construction paper drawings of superheroes taped to the doors, at the bamboo mats laid over the linoleum floors. He was close enough to her that she could feel his breath.
“Off her meds and wandering around a flooded city with two tiny boys? You think it’s a good thing?”
“But she can’t be just wandering around—” She moved away from him, half-sure, suddenly, that the children and Reyna must be hiding somewhere, that they couldn’t be out there in that. “She has to have gone somewhere safe. To the Superdome, you think?”
She stepped into the blue bedroom again, casting her eyes around for a child hiding under the covers, behind a standing lamp, in the overflowing basket of clothes. A pair of action figures stood in battle on the dresser, a dinosaur puzzle waited, half-done, on one of the beds.
“If she left,” she said, “if she took them with her, she has to have gone somewhere safe.”
“No way she went to the Superdome.” Troy shot up his chin. “She hates places like that. Hates crowds. Hates the police. And she doesn’t have a car, doesn’t have anybody’s going to take her in. Those boys were supposed to be away, goddamn it. She tells me they got a scholarship to summer camp in Mississippi, and I believe her like a fool, until the storm is on us, until it’s too late—Willy giggling in the background. She told him to hush! She told him to hide from me!”
He shook the bottle and she heard the tense little rattle of the pills as they hit the top and fell back down—nearly full. He laughed.
“You think she got herself in good hands, Cora? Last time she went off her meds, Tyrone had to call me from the closet she had him locked into ’cause she was afraid the police were going to come and take him. Thank God he’d stolen her phone. I filled this prescription for her three weeks ago, and she gives me a look like butter wouldn’t melt. You think she got those kids to someplace safe, Cora, do you?”
“What about her boyfriend? She could have gone to her boyfriend’s, couldn’t she?”
“Who, the river pilot? Darryl? Darryl doesn’t give a shit about her,” Troy said, walking back through the piles of clothes, through the living room where the windows were X’ed over with duct tape, and out of the open door. Cora ripped a picture from the refrigerator—Reyna as she remembered her from the day they’d spent at Troy’s apartment five years or so ago, when Reyna had come in her nursing scrubs to help them paint the ceiling. She’d brought beer and her eyes had sparkled when she laughed, and none of them had done much painting. In the picture, she was laughing like that, holding two round-headed little boys in her glowing arms, and Cora folded it into her pocket as she went after Troy down the stairs.
“Besides, Darryl’s in the East,” Troy was saying to himself, “so unless you want they drowned in my man Darryl’s attic—”
Out in the daylight again, Troy strode across the grass to where the women still sat on their stoop, still fanning their glossy magazines.
“Excuse me,” Cora asked them, “is there any chance you’ve seen Reyna? Reyna Holyfield?”
The women were shaking their heads.
“Or the little boys?” Cora held up the picture. “Two little boys.”
“Tyrone and Willy,” Troy said.
The younger of the women, wearing a purple sundress, her hair scorched, tilted her head to look at the photograph. “Oh, you mean Queen Madam.” She twirled her finger beside her head. “I saw her leaving here with the little princes and a Hefty bag of their shit yesterday, seemed like the storm was just about getting ready to blow.”
“You know where she was headed?” Troy asked.
The young woman just shook her head, her lips disappearing between her teeth.
“Maybe to go find you,” the older woman said, looking from him to Cora, “she knows where you can be found—”
“Thank you,” Cora said, but Troy had already begun to walk away, leading her out to the sidewalk over the wet grass and onto Martin Luther King. This was the way Reyna had gone. Cora could see her walking out into the storm—a fine, tall woman striding into the street, clutching her belongings to her chest, pushing against the wind under the flailing power lines, the boys following, fighting their way towards something better than the apartment behind them gone dark as night, soon to be filled with thunder and rain.
Beside the Jeep, the two men who they’d seen coming in were sitting on the curb. The one in the bandana turned his head and watched them.
“Give us a lift?” the other one said when they’d gotten close enough. He didn’t raise his head from the street, only jiggled his foot in its sneaker.
“Where?” Troy asked, lifting his hand and flinging it out across the city. “You know the levee’s breached. It’s flooded bad.”
“Can you take us to the Convention Center?” the man said. “They’re going to have buses leaving.”
“Get in,” Troy said.
Cora got up behind the wheel and watched the rearview as the men climbed into the backseat, then put the Jeep in gear and turned it around. The men sat silently, watching the city pass. She drove slowly, pulling up onto the neutral ground in places to avoid telephone poles, trashcans, pieces of torn roof, until she saw it there in front of her for the first time, the real flood, the lake itself spreading out over the streets and under the highway, an infernal body of water from which the scalped Superdome rose like a volcanic island. She stopped the car, got out into the street and watched the brown lake come towards them.
WITH EACH STROKE of the oars, the clay surface of the flood cracked, and dark mud spun up from beneath the pirogue. Flotsam littered the water—milk jugs and chair seats, rubber dolls, plastic bags, books, and ice chests. Troy pulled them forward past the waists of telephone poles and the trembling whiskers of car antennas, past house after drowned house.
Reyna and her children were not at Troy’s house. No
t at his aunt’s or cousins’. It was impossible to look for her at Darryl’s, in the East, and so now they had launched the boat near the cemeteries and were heading for Mrs. Randsell’s. After that, they would begin in earnest.
It was already two o’clock—a stinking mist rose off the flood into the sun. All day long, dogs had been crying out in their broken dog-tongues when they heard the boat come near. Everywhere, animals were trapped behind walls and spiked fences. Now, when the oars splashed down, there was a crash, a whimper. A Labrador and two little puppies pressed their faces against an X-taped window. And then all at once there was shouting. A gun fired, and Troy dropped the oars in their locks and brought his hands up to the back of his head. Cora squinted into the sun glaring off the shingles, but she couldn’t see a soul.
The shouting resolved to words. “I said: State your business.”
At the corner, a big white man stood on his roof, pistol flashing at his hip. A little girl and a woman with sweat-pasted brown hair huddled in the shade of a flowered bedsheet behind him.
“We’re out saving people,” Cora said.
“You ought to speak up, girl!” The man’s voice was shaky, like he was drunk, his face red and tight. “You’re gonna want me to hear you, I think. So I don’t decide to go ahead and waste another bullet.”
“I guess you don’t want to be saved?” Cora’s voice sounded so foreign to her—calm and haughty—she wasn’t entirely sure she was the one who’d spoken.
The man’s finger left the trigger. “You preaching to me, young woman?”
Cora closed her eyes, channeling Tess in a fresh green suit, standing in front of the disciplinary committee at school. “Far be it from me.”
The drunk man laughed, and his wife lifted her leg and toed him in the ass.
“You tell him, honey,” she said to Cora.
“Who you out saving?” the man asked, but now in that teasing voice older men liked to use on her when she was dressed nice. “Beggars can’t be choosers, you know.”
Cora didn’t answer, and Troy kept staring straight ahead as a helicopter swooped over them, low enough to riffle the water. A man was leaning out of the open door, shooting pictures.
“Are you the looters?” the little girl asked, peeking out now from behind her father’s leg.
The woman shushed her, and Troy, for the first time, looked up at them.
Cora squinted at the water line riding the house’s eaves. “There’s been looting?”
“Y’all haven’t been listening—” The man waved his gun at their radio. “We’re just sitting here waiting on the war.”
Troy began to nod as he put his hands on the oars. “We’ve still got some of our own folks to see to, but we’ll come back. Y’all are doing fine—”
“You’ll come back?” The woman’s voice went high, an odd sort of jubilant whine.
“We’ll come back,” Cora said.
The woman clapped a hand over her chest as the oars rose, dripping thick flood.
Troy kept his eyes on the rooflines, but they didn’t see anyone else. A boat motor started in the distance. Troy worked the oars. Finally, the way widened out, as if they’d left the cypress passages for a backwater lake, and they floated onto a body of water that stretched out between an avenue of treetops. Behind them, beside the flooded canal, the dry asphalt of Palmetto rose over Airline Drive. Northline ran beneath them, and as they turned up it, the world seemed almost right, as if the trees and low houses lined the banks of a natural river. Cora squinted through the high branches of the oaks at the silent, sealed upper stories of the houses.
“You ever been out fishing?” Troy asked.
Cora nodded. Years ago, they’d gone out in the Rigolets in the Maestres’ motorboat. The sky was a saturated blue, and there had been blood on the deck as the men slit open the red sequined bellies of the fish.
“Chef took me out when he moved me up from dishwashing,” Troy said. “Said that was how I’d learn to respect the product, understanding where it comes from. But all it made me want to do was fish. Quiet and peace, quiet and peace. Saw a lot of pelicans too. Pterodactyl-looking things.”
In front of them, the sign for Stella Street poked above the water, and Troy nodded towards it and pulled them closer. As they neared the curb, the boat snagged on something, and Troy swung an oar underneath the hull. The sound of a plastic trashcan hitting pavement bounced through the water as the pirogue wandered into the canopy of an oak. Suddenly, the light went dim, the day calm and almost cool. The shadows of the leaves rained down. Troy made to move them out again, but Cora reached up for the branch that hung overhead. The tree creaked as she put her weight on it, releasing its earthen perfume. Resurrection fern was greening along the lower limbs, and the upper branches lifted up over the fence of Mrs. Randsell’s house, leafing out above its low-pitched roof.
“Wait for me,” she said.
Before Troy could answer, she had climbed into the tree.
The wide branch ramped up gently, and Cora shimmied along it on her hands and knees like she’d used to do as a kid, up and over the fence and the swamped garden. Even looking down at Troy, who was tying up to the tree’s trunk, she wasn’t dizzy, wasn’t scared. She dismounted onto a narrow windowsill and, holding onto the gutter, looked around.
She had only been to Mrs. Randsell’s house once, when she and her mother had gone to bring her a housewarming gift one of those days Cora was suspended from school. She remembered entering through the gate in the high fortress-like fence. The fence top was jagged with broken glass, and the gate had spears for finials. Mrs. Randsell was safe here, Cora remembered thinking, so much safer than she herself was at home on Esplanade, where the old windows rumbled at all hours with the chaos-bringing voices of the drunks. As she watched her mother chatter away about how to care for the narcissus she’d brought, Cora had thought she’d like a wall like that, with a gate to which only she had the key.
Cora knocked—“Mardi Gras Mambo,” something cheerful—on the shutter slats.
“Mrs. Randsell, can you hear me? It’s Tess Eshleman’s daughter? I’m here to fetch you.”
Through the shutters, Cora could see the bolt that held them closed, but the window was open behind them. Holding the gutter tight, she raised her foot and kicked, and the slats broke with a damp crunch.
Even on the second floor, up above the flood, the house felt like it was drowning. It kept its mouth shut like a girl playing dead at the bottom of a pool. The closed shutters muffled the outside world; the barking dogs and helicopters sounded far away. Through the floor, she heard the water slapping the walls. There was a glassy clinking as if toasts were being raised, something hollow that filled and emptied, something like a clock ticking.
In the filtered light, the sitting room looked like it belonged to the Titanic. A yellow armchair, an empty ashtray, a lacquered screen drifted in the crepuscular currents that pulled on the chair’s skirt, the chain of a Chinese lamp, the telephone’s cord. The chair cushion was still indented from Mrs. Randsell’s weight, the ashtray full of butts that would slowly lose the smell of smoke. The sour smell of the flood was seeping in. Cora found it hard to move. Twice she opened her mouth, twice said nothing. Then, somewhere among these upper rooms, a clock struck one.
“Mrs. Randsell?”
She would not think of the old woman floating facedown by the kitchen door or trapped against the bathroom ceiling. Instead, she would imagine Mrs. Randsell crouching in a corner, frightened at last.
Cora opened the door to a small, orderly closet. The clock’s chime wound itself.
“Mrs. Randsell, it’s Cora Boisdoré. My mom, Tess Eshleman, sent me to find you.”
All the doors were open wide. She circled them: A guest room with two twin beds made up in blue. A marble bath with frosted stars around the mirror that reflected her shadow. A master bedroom with a tall half tester piled with pillows—Cora ran her fingers down its posts. The spore-pocked fern fronds might have been her gran
dfather’s work.
At the top of the steps a door with a dead bolt and a security chain was wide open. The track of a stair lift ran down the wall and into brown water. The chair was submerged.
Leaning out over the brass banister, Cora moved down to the level of the flood. A palm in a plastic pot rocked in the clutches of the curtains. A china rabbit floated, ears up, beside a jug of bleach. The gray sludge that covered the water outside had not entered the house, and Cora could see clear to the bottom, where foam matting lifted the edges of the rugs. Above her, the floor creaked, and she turned around to see the old woman standing at the head of the stairs, holding a silver letter opener like a dagger.
“Mrs. Randsell?”
“What are you doing in my house?”
“It’s Cora. Cora Boisdoré.” She put her hands up. “I’m here to help you. Your son, Augie, my parents’ friend? He asked me to help you. Can I help you?”
“Boisdoré?” The old woman nodded her head, the letter opener falling to her side. “Oh, that’s right. You’re Tess’s daughter.” She sighed. “This is bad, isn’t it?”
“We have a boat tied up outside,” Cora said. “We’ll bring it in.”
FROM THE JEEP, they watched the two teenagers they’d rescued climb up and over the fence of what they claimed was their aunt’s house in the Riverbend. Not that it mattered whose house it was, so long as it was dry. When one of the boys came out of the front door to wave good-bye, Mrs. Randsell rolled down her window.
“You all be careful,” she yelled at them, then rolled the window up. “Our corporal act of mercy for the day.”
Mrs. Randsell’s linen slacks were still wet from when she’d tripped on the stairs getting into the pirogue, and her arthritic hands seemed to hurt her, but she had commanded that they fill the Jeep with people before they left the flood.
“Now, you’ll bring me home,” the old woman said. It was not a question.
The Floating World Page 20