I opened the door of the rental car, stepped into the Mississippi air, and stretched my arms high above my head. I hadn’t slept in my car since a friend talked me into “camping out” early in a parking lot for the privilege of paying a hundred and twenty dollars to walk eighteen ridiculous holes and lose eleven balls on one of the toughest and most prestigious golf courses in the country, Bethpage Black in New York.
I would’ve given anything to be back at that parking lot instead of at this one in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
I opened the back door of the car and retrieved my toiletry bag from my duffel. My neck and back argued about which hurt worse.
There were new faces at the registration counter when I walked back into the lobby. The lounge was buzzing with people eating granola bars and drinking fresh juice. In the background, Glenn Beck was on the radio riffing about the recovery and Mayor Nagin. Another movie was playing, one I’d never seen before, and a few of the guests from the night before were gathered again, debating FEMA, Cheney, and whether the levees were blown on purpose.
“You hear about this fella from the Coast Guard?” A man in jam shorts took the floor. “He’s in charge now. What’s his name?”
“Admiral Allen,” someone answered.
“Yeah, that guy is for real, ya’ll. Read that thing in the paper over there. This cleanup is back on track, ya’ll. The Coast Guard is on the scene.”
“Amen, brother!” A woman playfully mocked and raised her hands to the sky. “That’s my man right there!”
“That’s right, girl. Now let’s roll. Kids!” He yelled to two children playing tag in the hallway leading from the lobby. “Load up, we’re rolling.”
I watched the man say good-bye and thank you to the two employees at the counter. Even from where I stood across the lobby it seemed he had love in his eyes. He gave them each a man-hug—shaking one hand, hugging behind the back with the other.
“Godspeed, friends,” he said and walked away. His wife had already loaded the children in their Trooper. As promised, he gunned it and rolled out in style.
I took a granola bar and a cup of cranberry juice. Only one table had an open seat. A man sat alone nursing a cup of coffee and picking at a dry muffin.
“May I?”
He nodded.
“Busy place, eh?”
“Sure is.” He added another cream to his coffee and stirred.
I don’t know that I felt like I needed to make small talk, since he clearly wasn’t interested, but I did anyway. Maybe it was the two days, a thousand miles alone, and sleeping in the car.
“You coming or going?” I asked him.
“Going home.”
“Been here helping out?”
He added yet another cream to his coffee. “Was. Drove down to New Orleans. I’m with FEMA. Though more like a contractor, really.” He stirred his coffee. “Now I’m going home.”
“What’s it like down there?”
“You headed down?”
“I am. Today’s day three of my drive from New York.”
“Good luck to you.”
“That bad?”
“It’s everything you’ve seen on the news, and some of what you’ve heard.”
“I’m Luke, by the way, Luke Millward.”
“Bobby.” He shook my hand.
“Nice meeting you, Bobby.” I unwrapped my granola bar. “So it’s bad. Snakes, alligators, all that?”
“Nah, some snakes I imagine, but a lot of that stuff isn’t true; it’s just rumor. Rumor is the only thing that spreads faster than water or fire. But it’s just as dangerous.”
Wise man, I thought.
“So what did you see?”
“Ah, now, you don’t want to know half of what I’ve seen.”
“Actually, I do. I’m a photographer. I’d love to know where to go, where to stay away from.”
“What’s real and what’s not?”
“Bingo.” The word seemed out of place as soon as I spoke it.
“It’s as bad as it looks on TV. The chaos is dying down because so many people have left the city by now. And because a lot of the holdouts are dying too. It’s so hard to get to them in time.”
“I can imagine.”
Bobby got up and refilled his coffee at the buffet.
“No, Luke. You can’t.” He picked right up when he returned to his chair.
“Two days ago I was on a boat, clearing out a neighborhood. Marking doors. We came upon a house on the east side, water
lapping at the top step. There were six or seven kids on the porch. Cutest little kids. So young. So polite. Sweet kids, every one. Youngest was just a baby, barely walking; oldest I imagine was probably twelve.”
He added a creamer to his fresh coffee.
“There were three of us. We came up alongside the porch and two of us hopped off with life jackets to rescue the kids. Planned to take them in two trips, split up the two oldest kids so they could help. My partner and I got onto the porch and told the kids we were there to help. That everything was all right now.”
Another creamer.
“I asked where their parents were. One of the little ones, maybe five years old, said Mom was inside and needed help. Right then the oldest grabbed my arm and led me in the house. The smell . . . man, the smell took me right back to ’Nam. The youngster led me through the family room and around a corner toward a bedroom.”
Please be alive, I thought.
“Their mother was on her back in bed. Kid told me she’d been relying on oxygen for a couple years.”
Please be alive.
“She was dead.” Bobby added a third creamer to his coffee.
I closed my eyes and pictured what it must have been like the night the storm rolled in. Wind threatening to push the house over. Fear in the children’s voices as the water rose. Mother reassuring them. “We’re going to be fine, children. Everything’s gonna be all right. Calm, calm, children, let’s pray to God again.”
I imagined their thirst as the post-Katrina heat wave baked the roof of the house. I imagined the lies the older siblings had to tell. “Momma will be up soon,” they must have said.
“You’re a good man,” I told Bobby.
“Am I? Because here I am going home. Quitting. I can’t see that again. I just can’t.” His eyes were so distant I wondered if he’d even remember meeting me.
“You came, Bobby. That makes you one of the good ones. One of the great ones.”
I gave my own story—the reason for the trip, the apprehension, the estrangement from my father, my growing fear that not only was my father dead, but that he’d died in a similarly brutal way.
I stood up, shook Bobby’s hand with both of mine, and thanked him for his service in the recovery effort.
“You know what,” he said. “Follow me out for a minute.”
I trailed him to the parking lot.
Bobby pulled a FEMA construction pass from his dashboard and handed it to me. “Put this on your dash. Trust me,” he said, “this’ll get you wherever you need to go.”
Then he wished me luck recovering my father and resumed his lonely drive home.
~ ~
The beginning of the end of the career of noted architect Charles Millward started with an ice sculpture and ended with a shouting match with one of the firm’s partners. The firm, the partner said, could only look past so many disappearances, missed deadlines, and embarrassing meetings.
They’d already offered to get him into an exclusive Dallas-area rehab center and foot the bill. His greatest defender in the firm, Kaiser, a recovering alcoholic himself, begged Dad to let him sponsor him in Alcoholics Anonymous.
“I’m fine,” Dad said. He repeated that so often I think he actually believed it.
I never did. Not when one drink became two, then three, then four. Not when Dad joked to a room full of colleagues paying a courtesy call after Mom’s funeral about taking his own life. And certainly not when we were both left alone in the deadly quiet to cope with the twe
nty-four-hour loneliness we felt when the house finally cleared of mourners and meatloaf. It’s an atmosphere unlike any other, and only those who’ve lost a loved one from underneath their own roof know it.
My camera never left my side during those early weeks of adjusting to life without my zombie mother constantly readjusting her pillow. I took pictures of the house, Mom’s things, bouquets that filled every room, the cemetery.
Dad found his solace and companionship in a bottle.
His guilt and loneliness were things I couldn’t understand. Dad told me he loved me and would always be there for me. But according to him, it was time for me to become a man and stop being embarrassed by him. On my eighteenth birthday, he wrote in my card that even though his dreams hadn’t all come true, mine still could, and he didn’t want to stand in the way.
One night before my final exams, Dad heard me crying in bed and came in smelling like Aquaman and Altoids. I told him it was finally setting in that Mom was going to miss graduation. I told him how much I missed the old her, the woman who raised me and loved me no matter the amount of stress I inflicted.
Dad told me in his best impersonation of a functional father, “Mom’s legacy to you is early entry into the adult world. Take advantage.”
It might have been the best advice he ever gave me.
When Dad arrived drunk for a photo expo in the school library during my senior year, I called a cab, calmly took him outside, and asked him to go home.
“But I want to see your work,” Dad stuttered.
“Go. I’ll bring the pictures home and show you in the morning.”
When Dad stood during graduation and yelled so obnoxiously after my name was called that he drowned out the names of Daniel Moore, Kelly and Jonathan Morrison, and Chucky Muth, I made him apologize to the parents of all three in the parking lot.
Despite the drama, I always told myself the time after Mom’s death wasn’t entirely wasted. I learned to cook pretty well, sign my father’s name, make mortgage payments, deposit his paychecks, do laundry, and apply for scholarships on my own.
I even learned that no amount of pressure would ever make me take a single drink of alcohol. Through all the high school parties, college raves, trips around the world, and high-class banquets, I’ve never had a taste.
One other good thing came from that year of living alone with Dad. Shortly after he quit his job—or got fired, depending on whose version one cares to believe—I convinced Dad to start playing music again. I told him what I thought the counselors he refused to see would have told him anyway. Music would soothe his soul. Help him cope. Give him purpose. Dad hadn’t played the guitar or his sax since Mom started complaining of the noise just before she died. It pained him, but he agreed it was for the best, and buried his instruments in their cases.
I was standing in the doorway of his den when he pulled his prized saxophone out of its case for the first time since Mom passed. His hands shook. The ding caused from the defining moment of my 8th grade year was still visible. Dad had taken it in to be fixed, but the brass never looked quite the same. A thin wrinkle in the bell scowled at me.
Dad cradled the sax in his hands like a newborn and wept.
“It’s OK, Dad. Mom would want you to play again. It’s time.”
“I can’t.” He looked up at me. Unshaven. Disheveled.
“Yes, you can. Play for her. Play for me.”
He put his lips to the reed and played a slow blues riff. The sound flooded the room, spilling through the open door to overflow the secret nooks and crannies throughout the house that must have felt like they hadn’t been touched by such magic in a lifetime.
When he finished the riff, he looked up at my wet eyes and smiled. He calmly returned the sax to its case. “More tomorrow,” he said. “I promise.”
Then he drove to the liquor store.
When I was accepted to NYU, Dad flew with me to New York, helped me enroll in school, and stayed sober for a couple of weeks. When I put him on a plane home to Texas, I hugged him and told him how proud I was that he was finally trying to quit drinking, finally ready to get his life back on track.
He soon sold the house, cashed in some investments at great penalty, and sent me money I didn’t ask for. Nevertheless I was grateful and told him so. The money was enough to survive quite well as a college student in New York.
Dad moved to Nashville to play music.
It didn’t take long for him to find a new liquor store.
Chapter
15
They were the longest miles I’d ever driven.
The trip from Hattiesburg to New Orleans was less than two hours, but I felt like I’d never arrive at the city’s edge. Downed trees and abandoned cars lined some stretches of the highway, and the temperature seemed to rise a degree with every mile marker I passed.
Someone had spray-painted Turn Around in red on a green-and-white mileage sign.
I tuned in to the only AM station I could find and listened as a DJ gave his assessment on the state of the city.
“Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Life is good in the Big Easy, my people. The city is slowly draining back into the rivers and into the blessed lake to our north. Now only sixty percent of our streets are in hiding from the government. That’s right, people. Is it possible our great city is in no rush to be saved by this government?”
I turned up the radio.
“No, not this government, not this government that pretended we weren’t here just a few weeks ago. Not this government, this federal government that has no use for a predominantly black city.”
I could hear the DJ shuffling papers on his desk.
“No, my people, this city is in no rush to go back to the way it was. Back to being ignored when we’re weak and held down when we show strength. No, we will not be ignored again, will we, people? No, we will not. This city will dry out. This city will rebuild and recover and restore its spirit in spite of those we elected to lead us. In spite of the agencies that slept through Katrina and only awoke when CNN told them to.”
I pulled into a gas station that appeared open, but a cardboard sign on the pumps read: Still no fuel. Ride a bike.
I grinned, took a picture of the sign, and continued listening.
“Now, of course I do read the papers. I see the news. I know that most of our city is gone. Our people scattered about like lost tribes in cities near and far, so far away. But we must gather those tribes, my people. Our mission, the mission for those of us who stayed or who have already returned, is to rebuild a city our brothers and our sisters can return home to. We want our blessed neighbors back, and even our enemies, yes, even that woman who stole your job, or the man who stole your wallet; it doesn’t matter. We want them all to return. We want to rebuild this city so that it invites them back. New Orleans needs her people back. She needs to heal them . . . Remember this. Without our people, there is no city. Without our city, there is no music. Without music, the world has nothing. Now let’s get to work, people. Back after this.”
If that man doesn’t have a congregation, I thought, it’s a crime. Then I realized he did have a congregation—weekdays from nine to noon. I saved the station on the car’s radio presets.
A policeman pulled into the parking lot and walked into the gas station convenience store. I turned off the car and followed him in.
“Officer, can I ask you a question?”
The officer pulled a Red Bull from the drink cooler. “Shoot.”
“I’m driving down into the city, trying to get to the French Quarter. What’s the best way?”
“What on earth you want to do that for? Hardly nothing open.” He turned his back and walked toward a display full of Slim Jims.
“It’s for work. Not for fun, obviously.”
“What kind of work?”
“I’m a photographer.”
He looked me over. “Turn around, kid, there’s plenty of ya down there already.”
“Actually, I am a photographer,
but I’m also going to identify my father.”
“He died in the storm?”
“Yes, sir.”
The officer turned his back again and walked up to the counter. He pulled a free map from a stand by the register. “Come here.”
He opened the map and grabbed a pen tied to a string attached to a donut case. “These roads are still closed.” He drew squiggles through a surprising number of lines. “This is the main artery. It’s open here and here, closed here. The Quarter is dry, but there’s not a real direct route unless you’re driving an ambulance or military Hummer. You should be able to get to here.” He circled an intersection a few blocks east of the Superdome. “When you get stopped, because you will get stopped, tell them you’re Coast Guard Auxiliary.”
“Thank you. And there’s ample parking down there?”
The officer looked at me like I was the biggest idiot he’d ever encountered.
“It’ll be tough, young man, but just keep driving around. I think you’ll find a spot open up. All those day-tripping, gambling tourists have to go home at some point.”
The clerk behind the counter snickered.
“Sorry.” The officer looked sincerely embarrassed. “That was wrong.” He shook my hand. “Good luck with your father.”
“Thanks for the map.” I nodded and walked toward the door. But in a simple, insignificant act that made me think of my father, I turned around, took out my wallet, and paid for the officer’s Red Bull and Slim Jim.
“God bless you,” he said.
Twenty minutes later I found myself navigating side streets and roadblocks. I saw signs and scenes that days earlier had only existed on my television in my comfortable Manhattan studio apartment.
Flooded cars. An abandoned shopping cart filled with personal belongings. Two older men sleeping in the shade under a bridge. At least I assumed they were sleeping. After I took their photos through my open driver’s window I realized they could just as easily be dead.
I parked on a residential street that appeared to have the most life. A man and woman dragged a taped-up refrigerator to the street curb. One of their neighbors had already done the same.
I locked my bags in the trunk, put my camera around my neck, stuck my notepad in my back pocket, and double-checked that the photo of Dad was still in my shirt pocket.
Recovering Charles Page 8