City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  But on this Saturday morning Malcolm woke up vomiting and running a 102-degree fever. Alarmed, Alice called Dr. Bernard, who was out of town for the weekend according to the answering service, which took their number and said that the doctor would be checking his messages. Malcolm clearly could not travel until his fever lowered and he stopped vomiting. Alice gave him liquids and tried to get him to keep some Tylenol down, and she sat with him in his bedroom, stroking his hair and comforting him, occasionally wiping his forehead with a cool, damp cloth.

  Friends called throughout the morning to see where Craig and Alice were headed. Craig’s sister Debra phoned from Seattle to make sure that they were leaving town. Arthur Borofsky called, from Natchez, to urge Craig to leave as soon as possible. Doug Worth checked in to see if they needed anything; Connie and the two children were headed to Hammond, but Doug was going to stick around to keep watch over his house. Bobby and Jen were packing up to stay with friends in Baton Rouge, a fact that felt ominous to Craig since Bobby never left for hurricanes.

  The morning news shifted further into disaster mode with each quarter hour. Satellite images of the swirling white cloud mass, which seemed to cover the entire Gulf of Mexico, flashed constantly on the television, with regular updates on its gathering strength. Across New Orleans people who rarely if ever evacuated were packing up to ride out the storm elsewhere, as if driven by reports of an invading army approaching. Everyone knew that the traffic during evacuations could get apocalyptic as a storm approached. Everyone knew someone who had spent ten hours making the ordinarily one-hour drive to Baton Rouge during the evacuation for Hurricane Ivan the year before, or else they themselves had done it. Many left earlier than usual in an attempt to beat the traffic, while others waited until the last minute, hoping that the storm would miss and they would be spared the horrible trip.

  While Alice took care of Malcolm, Craig handled the tasks he and Alice would otherwise have shared—the familiar stowing of valuables, the placing of plastic garbage bags over furniture near windows—they had it down to a routine, as they did the restoring of order and normalcy quickly when they returned. He got Annie’s breakfast ready for her, and then he gave her a few little tasks to do to keep her busy—carrying some laundry upstairs, emptying wastebaskets from the bedrooms. Craig went room by room through the house, forcing himself to breathe and remember that the storms always turned out to be false alarms. Packing was something they did to be responsible in case the worst should happen, but it would be all right.

  Just before noon Craig took a break and stopped into the kids’ bedroom, where Malcolm was propped up in bed with Alice reading to him.

  Alice looked up at Craig from the book in her lap and said, “How’s it going?”

  “It’s going fine,” he said, looking down at his son. “The question is how’s it going in here. You okay, Big Chief?” He walked over to the bed and crouched down, smiling at his unsmiling son. He put the back of his hand against the boy’s forehead, which was very warm.

  “We just got some Fructalite down,” Alice said, looking at Malcolm, “and a Tylenol and we’re going to see how it goes, right Malcolm?”

  The boy nodded weakly.

  It always touched Craig, and made him faintly jealous, to see how tenderly Alice acted with Malcolm. She had more patience with him than she did with Annie, who was generally much more agreeable. She certainly had more patience with him than Craig did. Craig had little intuitive feeling for what his son was feeling or thinking, the way he did with Annie. In Malcolm, furious energy and stubbornness alternated with interludes of passivity and what Craig had learned in therapy to call regressive behavior—wanting to be carried, wanting to be fed. On the one occasion when Craig had used that phrase in reference to Malcolm Alice looked at him as if he was out of his mind. “Regressive behavior?” she said, almost laughing in Craig’s face. “He’s two years old.” Craig had answered that Annie hadn’t acted that way when she was two, but the point stuck. The truth was that the passivity reminded Craig uncomfortably of a side of himself. In any case on this morning the boy was unquestionably sick, and Alice’s tenderest, most nurturing side came out, as it always did, and Craig was grateful.

  To Alice, Craig said, “Would you like me to put together some lunch for you? It’s noon.”

  “I’m okay,” Alice said, smiling up at him gamely. Craig leaned down toward her and they kissed. “Can you get Annie’s lunch, though?”

  “I’m on it,” Craig said. To Malcolm he said, “You’re going to be okay, Big Man. You want anything from downstairs? You want me to bring up Thomas the Tank Engine?”

  “No thank you,” the boy said, an unusual locution for him, and said so simply; Craig felt a pang of tenderness for his brave son. “Well allright. You just let me know and I’ll bring it up.”

  “Thanks sweetie,” Alice said to him, opening Malcolm’s book again as Craig went downstairs to make lunch for Annie.

  After lunch, with the house more or less prepared for them to leave, Craig drove to the Gumbo offices in Mid-City to look around and make sure things were battened down. The traffic was heavy along Carrollton Avenue, but once he got past the interstate underpass by Tulane Avenue it abruptly lightened. The Gumbo parking lot was empty and Craig pulled up by the front door of the low, single-story building. He opened the door with his key and punched in the code on the security system; the reception area was dark, but enough light came in through the drawn blinds that he could see. He closed the door behind him and walked through the reception area to the main hall, where he walked past the empty cubicles and offices. The halls of the office were quiet.

  In his own office, Craig turned on the small table lamp next to the couch, and his desk lamp, then he shut the door. He sat behind his desk to think if there were anything he absolutely needed to do or to have with him. The offices were located in a solid, modern, low building built almost like a bunker, so it wasn’t going to blow away. He reasoned that everything was probably as safe there as it would be anywhere. The windows were double-thick and insulated, to keep the air-conditioning bills low. He looked around at his autographed photo of Fats Domino, at a poster on the back of his office door for the production of Streamers in which he and Alice had met, in school. His CDs, books written by friends and strangers, his own files containing everything he had written and copies of every issue of Gumbo that he had edited—283 of them, as of the previous week.

  Nothing ever happened, he reminded himself. The odds were way against it. But there was a different tone this time in the news reports. He pulled out his top right desk drawer and took a Benevol from the bottle he kept in there, a mild tranquilizer that he liked to tell his music pals acted as a sort of Dolby system, cutting out just the unpleasant highest frequencies. He got some water out of his own private cooler (the one little luxury he had half-jokingly insisted on in negotiations with Borofsky) and took the Benevol. He sat at his desk and closed his eyes and breathed deeply, slowly, several times, from his stomach. It will be all right, he said to himself.

  Where would he be if this were all gone? All this life had been a kind of exoskeleton, or scaffolding, inside which he had assembled enough of a self to keep the operation working. His self was invested in the city, in its rituals; he read meaning into it and it returned the favor by endowing him with a set of coordinates, a loose confederation of attitudes, and a community of others who operated under the same constellation. It was not a constellation of meaning he’d been born into; it was a refuge he’d found, a world that worked in a way he needed the world to work, a safe harbor to get away from something in himself for which he lacked a name, some emptiness, some longing, some intimation that perhaps he did not really even exist…But what if it wasn’t here anymore? Where, exactly would he be? Where was he? There had to be some kind of point to it all…

  This was a bad way of thinking. He was supposed to be calming himself down and not driving himself crazy with unanswerable questions. Keep breathing deeply, he thoug
ht. Center yourself.

  Useless. After a minute or so he opened his eyes, stood up, turned off the lights and lingered in the doorway of his office to take one more look around. He thought if there were anything he wanted to take with him just in case, then he decided to take nothing, as a gesture of faith. Maybe if he acted as if everything was going to be fine, it would be.

  SJ walked four blocks toward the Industrial Canal from his house to where they had closed off part of Tennessee Street for Little T’s birthday party. The neighborhood was lively with Saturday activity, slightly quieter because some had left, but most of the Lower Nine had stayed put. Hammers were going here and there, people putting plywood up over windows, but it seemed generally like a regulation Saturday. There hadn’t even been a question about whether to go ahead with the block party.

  That morning, SJ had driven all around the neighborhood, looking for Wesley—across Reynes Street, past the park, and down North Tonti past Forstall, right again on Andry. He knew that one of his nephew’s best friends lived over on North Miro, and also the girl’s cousin was on Lizardi, and SJ had decided to invest forty minutes or so driving around to see if he could catch a glimpse of Wesley or find someone to ask. He was concerned especially to find out if his nephew was aware of the coming storm and prepared. And, too, he wanted Wesley’s help preparing his house and Lucy’s house. Looking for Wesley, frustrated by his nephew’s disappearance, SJ was balanced between anger and worry. The two emotions often came packaged together for him.

  SJ had most of what he needed stockpiled at home—plywood, fitted with special hooks, batteries, candles, radio, water. SJ didn’t work on Saturdays; he kept the day set aside for himself, usually to pursue the various projects he had going around his own house. This Saturday wouldn’t be much different, aside from helping some neighbors board up their houses. He stopped into Happy Shop to buy some gum, a small store run by a Vietnamese family, located on North Claiborne. Some people in the neighborhood had an antagonistic attitude toward the Nguyens, who ran the place, especially some of his fellow veterans, but SJ was always friendly to them.

  Now SJ could smell the grills going a block away. On this afternoon he wore a white ribbed light cotton sweater, a small gold cross on a chain around his neck outside the sweater, a beige cap and a pair of beige pleated slacks. He cut a figure in the neighborhood, liked looking good when he went out. An elder statesman, but still young enough to take care of himself and others. It was a hot, sunny afternoon, and he walked past the houses with pleasure, the familiar houses, wooden shotgun houses, brick houses, cinder blocks, but mostly classic wooden shotguns. Most—even the poorest—had some little decoration, touches of individual sensibility, a hand-carved sign over the door reading THE JOHNSON’S, or a fanciful flower grotto set inside a truck tire, or a couch outside on the porch. It was home, this neighborhood. One man, whose name SJ never could remember, was grilling something on a little hibachi in his driveway and called out to SJ “Ready in five if you hungry, J.” He passed the house of a man everyone knew only as Mr. Joe and saw the chickens the man kept in his yard behind his waist-high hurricane fence. Up on the corner of Tennessee Street and North Derbigny he waved to two women he knew, who were sitting out on some steps as he approached.

  “I was saying to Jawanda,” one of the two, named Delois, said, without preamble, “I always like seeing you because you pulled together.” She smiled up at SJ from under a bright yellow, crotcheted hat. She was missing her two bottom front teeth.

  “Look like GQ,” the other one, Jawanda, said. She wore a tight-fitting black top and her hair was in curlers.

  He leaned on the iron railing on the steps going up to their small porch, where they had a cooler out.

  “How is Marvin coming along?” SJ asked.

  “See, that’s what I’m talking about,” Jawanda said, taking a big slug off her beer.

  “He supposed to be rotated out,” Delois said, “but now I don’t know. They got him on extra rotations.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “See, that ain’t right. When your time up is supposed to be up. Reserves ain’t supposed to be but one goddamn weekend a month. And Marvin on his third rotation straight through.”

  SJ lifted his cap with one hand, ran the other over his smooth scalp and replaced the cap. “They trying to fight a war like there’s no war going on. They need to put in the draft again.”

  “What good the draft gonna do, J?” Delois said. “They just need to get out of that motherfucker…”

  A man in his fifties walked up to their little group, wearing an oversized black T-shirt with the words GHETTO CASH on it over a picture of a gun. “Allright,” he said, and SJ put out his hand to the man, who took it in an old-fashioned soul handshake, forearms at right angles and thumbs pointed upward. The man had graying hair and a goatee and eyes that slanted downward slightly at the sides, giving him a look somewhere between laughing and crying. He and SJ had been in Vietnam at the same time.

  “Shan-DRA,” Delois yelled to someone in the distance. “Tell Tee-Bo get out that street.”

  “What the draft does,” SJ said, “is if everyone had to send they son or daughter over wouldn’t be no more war in Iraq.”

  “Yeah, you right about that,” the man, whose name was Alfred, said.

  “How’s your mama?” SJ said. “She doing allright?”

  “The diabetes got on her,” Alfred said, “and they amputated her leg. She in a wheelchair. But she allright. She steady getting stronger. When she start hollering about she want her hair done I’ll know she allright.”

  “Are you going to move her for the storm?”

  The man shrugged. “She won’t go. She stubborn. Don’t want to leave the house.”

  “Where Lucy at?” Jawanda said.

  “I don’t know,” SJ said. “She’ll probably come by later. Lucy’s on her own clock.”

  “I know that’s right.”

  Down the block children played in an inflatable house filled with brightly colored plastic balls. At the far end was a platform with a couple of turntables, and some of the neighborhood young men were playing hip-hop over the speakers. Up and down the street people had their own little hibachis and grills going.

  “You got your house boarded?” SJ asked the woman named Delois. “What I’m protecting, J? I can’t be lifting that wood, take it up, put it down once twice a month. Ain’t nothing ever happen anyway. What they say about this one.”

  “Mayor said on TV this one going to be big,” Jawanda said. “They telling people get out. Oliver Thomas was walking around here early talking about get out of town.”

  “That all C.Y.A.,” Delois said. “They really thought something gonna happen they make it mandatory and have buses lined up all on Claiborne. Shit. You can’t get up and run every time somebody say Boo…You don’t hear nobody talking about evacuation plan, meet here, do this. They just covering they ass for the white folks and the insurance. Plus my check coming on Thursday; I ain’t about to leave.”

  “I’ll come by tomorrow and put up some wood,” SJ said.

  “No, SJ,” Delois said. “I ain’t want to sit around in the dark listening at the wind. I want to be able to get out if I got to get out.” SJ looked around him, and he remembered an image from when he was barely in his teens, of the streets flooded during Hurricane Betsy, and helping his father pull his mother and Lucy in a dinghy they had gotten from somewhere.

  “Well…” SJ said, straightening up, brushing off the side of his slacks, “you call me, let me know if you want me to come over and board you up, hear?”

  “Thank you baby,” Delois said, reaching her arms out and hugging SJ.

  “I’m-a walk over and see what they got at the truck.”

  “Hey SJ, that’s good. They got Italian sausage cooking there by Charles.”

  Alfred took his foot off the ladies’ steps and said, “Y’all see Tina, I’m just down here.”

  “Allright, baby.”
>
  The two men walked off to get some food. They never talked about the army at all, or even brought it up. They talked some about the sad Saints game the night before, but mostly they just walked along enjoying being there. The street was full of life; groups of girls stood talking and eyeing groups of boys who pretended not to be eyeing them back, or who communicated with them by pantomime and facial expression until the girls turned away, giggling or with expressions of exaggerated nonchalance and even dismissal. Older people sat out on steps, leaned on railings, talking to one another or just watching the activity in the street. They knew the story behind the story of everyone on that street. They had seen neighborhood adults turn into the old people who sat behind their walkers; they had seen their friends’ and cousins’ babies turn into these young men and women, had seen the young men and women in band uniforms and cars, in graduation robes and caskets.

  SJ and his friend stopped and got hot sausage at one of the grills, and while he was waiting SJ noticed Wesley, down toward the end of the block, talking to a couple of other young men by the turntables. Behind the turntable platform he could see a couple of the motorbikes they rode around on.

  When they had finished eating, SJ said goodbye to his friend and walked down to where his nephew was. Wesley and another young man were talking, shoulder to shoulder, conspiratorially, Wesley looking from under his brows at the other young man as SJ approached. Then Wesley acknowledged his uncle with his eyes and a short head bob, finished whatever it was he was saying to the other young man, and as SJ walked up to them Wesley turned and gave his uncle a quick one-arm hug, a sign of affection, but delivered in a self-assertive manner of which SJ took note.