City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  Days and weeks of waiting, of drifting.

  One late September day he woke up feeling allright, for no reason he could think of. He looked at himself in the mirror, put on a light-green ribbed shirt he had gotten at Target with Aaron and Dot who took him shopping one day, and some slacks, clothes he had never even taken out of the bag. He went downstairs for breakfast, and Aaron and Dot brightened to see him looking fresh.

  They had a fine time over breakfast, talking about nothing in particular, a break in the clouds, relief for everyone. At one point SJ was drinking some orange juice and something unfamiliar came over him; he spit the juice back in the glass, looking down into the glass, and then he was sitting with his head bowed down and his lips pressed together and shaking, trying to contain it. His neck muscles rigid. Some of the juice dripped down the front of his new shirt and Dot stood up and went over to him and put her arms around his shoulders; his body rigid and shaking.

  He would go two or three days without shaving, sometimes more. He noticed one day that part of his beard had started coming in gray. He had never had any gray at all, anywhere. It didn’t seem to matter much.

  Aaron would get him to go out for walks. Aaron, who had also been in Vietnam, knew a fair amount about the traumatic syndrome that SJ was struggling with, and exercise and talking through things could be important. Some days they would walk and SJ was silent, some days he would talk for a while, and then get silent. Often he had violent fantasies that would crumble apart into debilitating grief. “I don’t want to be angry like this A,” SJ said. “I spent long enough dealing with it. I never thought I’d have to be back in this.”

  “You know more now,” Aaron said. “You equipped more to deal with it.”

  “I get imagery, just like after discharge. Just like it. But it’s different. I can’t get some of it out of my mind.”

  “You could go see counseling section down at the V.A.”

  “I don’t want to talk to nobody about it who wasn’t there, Aaron. Except you. I’m not going to act out nothing, A. Even if I was going to take me a mad moment, A—who I’m gonna shoot? Who’s responsible?”

  One thing that did help was that Lucy and Wesley were around. It had felt to him like a miracle, really, when he saw them each again for the first time. Lucy had come in first, on the plane; he went to the airport with Aaron to meet her. They saw her before she saw them, as she walked down the concourse looking around for them, and then when she saw them her face first expanded in recognition, her eyes widening, and then she walked toward them quickly, carrying some heavy bag, and she fell apart in SJ’s arms, sobbing as SJ embraced her and said, “It’s all right. It’s all right. We together now.” Wesley arrived two days later, and they all stayed at Aaron and Dot’s for a week and a half, Wesley on the day bed in the den. After the initial excitement of reunion, though, SJ sank back into his numbed, paralyzed state.

  Through FEMA, which Lucy had a knack for dealing with, Lucy and Wesley got “relocated” to an apartment just outside of Houston in the third week of September, half an hour from Aaron’s on the bus, a second-floor two-bedroom place in a glum four-story apartment house of ochre-colored bricks on a long tree-lined, arterial boulevard of apartment buildings in a residential neighborhood a mile or more from any stores. Grateful for the space, the perch, still Lucy didn’t know what to do with herself.

  “It nice, Samuel,” Lucy said. “It ain’t that. It just like being on the moon. Shopping malls all over but no place I can walk to.”

  “They have the bus,” SJ said, sitting next to her on the couch at Aaron’s, watching TV.

  “Where I’m a take the bus to? I can’t walk two blocks to the Tip-Top and buy me a pack of Kools and walk back. It like going to the North Pole if I want to get a beer.”

  Lucy was being dramatic for effect. In fact, two friends of hers from back home had also been relocated in that group of buildings, and they had cooked up some gumbo the best they could with what they could find in Houston. One of them, Wandrell, had gotten a car and they would drive to the mall and walk around like visitors from another planet among the cool, smooth, bright stores, the fountains, the lush plants watered by hidden watering systems. They would get looks sometimes from the slightly more cosmopolitan Houston women. Many of the New Orleans transplants still had some country clinging to them, even if their families had lived in the city for generations, and Houstonians, welcoming as they had been by and large, had taken to identifying the New Orleanians by their dress, their speech, their tempo. Of course the New Orleanians noticed the Houstonians noticing them, too.

  Aaron had delivered mail to Buddy Ermolino, a white guy who worked for Westco Cable, and through him Wesley was able to get a job training with the cable company to do installation in people’s homes. Wesley was a very quick study. “Basics” class took two weeks, after which Wesley had a full command of the basics of cable installation. The carpentry aspect was easy for him—drilling the holes in floors and walls with a kind of auger, threading the cables through, splicing…Wesley was coordinated and he was dexterous, and through his uncle he had already had plenty of carpentry experience. The day after the class ended he was out making calls on his own, and he was quickly up to four or five a day.

  In the truck, one of three floaters the company had on hand (after four months you were expected to get your own), Wesley got to know the city, studying his Hagstrom city map book for Houston and suburbs. Driving around, he kept his cell phone on and talked to Lucy three or four times a day. A week into the training he got his hair trimmed neatly and his beard shaved to a thin, sharply defined ridge along his jaw. For the first time in his life he was making decent money, acquiring a skill and dealing with the discipline of a real job. In the evening he would sit in the living room in the apartment he shared with Lucy and watch sports on the television, which he had hooked up himself.

  One day a large package arrived at Aaron’s house addressed to Wesley, with the words “Please forward” written on it, and that evening Wesley came over and opened it and it was from Art and Ell Myers, wrapped in newspaper and masking tape. Inside was what looked initially like a flat, jagged, random piece of wood. Flipping it over, Wesley saw painted lettering and, righting it, the random piece became a silhouette of Louisiana, carved, Wesley knew, by Art in his shop downstairs. Along the wide bottom of the boot was the word LOUISIANA, with a couple of musical notes and hot peppers, and coming down the top, stacked one-two-three, were the names WESLEY, LUCY, SAMUEL.

  There was a folded-up note with it, too, but Wesley left the room quickly, without reading it, while they all stood looking at this message from people they didn’t know. “Isn’t that something,” Dot said, picking up the wooden artifact. “Those people went to all that trouble.”

  SJ looked at the wood with a professional eye, turned it over to look at the back, where they had written with a black marker, “To Wesley, with love From Art and Ell; September 25, 2005.”

  Dot asked Lucy if Wesley was all right, and Lucy said, “He allright. He just don’t like to show his emotion sometimes.”

  The next day, a Saturday, Lucy and Dot’s half-sister Leeshawn took Wesley to buy a thank-you card. Lucy and Leeshawn had formed a friendship, and Lucy would ask SJ if he was going to “hook up” with her. “She like you a lot, Samuel. You need someone around take care of you. Look like she good for you.”

  Leeshawn. SJ had known her for a long time, she was younger than the rest of them, ten years younger than SJ. Leeshawn had had ups and downs, had a bachelor’s degree in communications from Texas State, but had logged some time on the dark side of the street, years ago. She had gotten married, moved to Los Angeles, where she had been for years, and had moved back a year and a half before. She worked now as a secretary for a law firm and did well, had her own place, had raised a son who lived in Albuquerque by his father.

  One day, after a dinner or two in the group at Aaron’s, at the beginning of October, Leeshawn called SJ at Aaron’s in the m
id-morning, saying, “I’m off for a day. Would you like to go for a walk?”

  SJ, who was watching the television in his pajama bottoms and a flannel shirt, didn’t ask where or anything else, only said, “Can you come by in about an hour?” He showered, shaved for the first time in three days, put on a fresh shirt that he had bought on a trip to the mall with Dot.

  At the park, walking, Leeshawn pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to SJ. He declined, saying, “I quit when the doctor told me I needed to.”

  “He hasn’t given me the red light yet,” she said, lighting one.

  They talked, they walked around. Leeshawn asked sensible questions about what SJ thought about the possible future in New Orleans, asked whether he was in touch with friends. She asked if he thought they had dynamited the levees, as some black residents of the Lower Nine were claiming.

  “I would be very dubious on that,” SJ said. “I’m not saying they couldn’t, but I don’t think they needed to even do that. The levees broke all over. I don’t really see that they did that.”

  “It does seem like folks are having a hard time getting in to look.”

  SJ appreciated the concern, but it was one step too much for him to go into the conspiracy thing. Who was going to make the decision to do it? The City Council? Not with Oliver Thomas on there, a son of the Nine. The Mayor? Highly doubtful. Who else? Too much chance them getting caught. They didn’t need to anyway. All they had to do was make weak levees and that was it. He was sick of thinking about it, and he found anger hissing inside him like a python. Except pythons, he thought, didn’t hiss. Boony had carried a book on snakes all the time they were doing reconnaissance until a mortar broke his sternum and that was something that was not to be thought of, dismissed. They used to catch snakes when they were kids over by the canal or they would go and play by the St. Maurice wharf, G-men or whatever it would be at the time and I like grape and you like strawberry and Bobby’s sister like mixing lemon-lime and peach and your mama got a pussy like an old man’s dick if I catch you say that again I will whip you until you can’t walk do you hear me Samuel and they would stand on line to see Butch and sometime Mama asked them to bring her a root beer and they would sit out on the front steps over on Dorgenois and if it was a Sunday sometimes they would hear a band coming, no big fancy police escort necessary in those days, not in that part of town, and they liked the Lady Buck Jumpers and the Jolly Bunch, and some did plaster and some did lath and sometimes you find old bottles in the dirt and he remembered when Hurricane Betsy came and everything flooded but not like this, not like this, not like this, not people thrown away like garbage, and where Butch where Mama where Bobby where Boony where Mary where Rondell where Roland and Charles and Erving, where Antoine, where Bat, where Sweets and Junior and Pops and Roderick and Sharonda Serena Bailey Annie and Mr. Joe and Mr. Jimmy and Miss Emily and Bootsy Dee Minnie Buster Too-Tall Jawonda Latrell and Shondra and Toots and Toot and Turnell…

  “SJ.”

  He felt hot tears coming to his eyes that he couldn’t stop and he turned away to weep and so couldn’t see Leeshawn watching him, fighting back her own tears, unsuccessfully. For a few moments she let him get a hold of things, but when he didn’t, she approached and put one hand on his right shoulder and stood close to him. “I’m right here,” she said.

  Later, when she dropped him off and they were saying goodbye, Leeshawn let her eyebrows go up just a little bit with the question, but not much, aware that it might be premature. SJ saw it, knew it, part of him wanted it but he wasn’t ready. That was so clear that he didn’t even think to himself, You getting old, man, as he might once have. And he saw, too, in her expression a hunger that was not just physical but emotional, which he did not want to disregard or disappoint. SJ hesitated as he was about to get out, and he saw her ready to take him up on any invitation to take another step.

  “Give me a couple of days.”

  “Allright, SJ,” she said, with just a scrim of self-protection in the tone, not distancing exactly, but a slight glaze, and SJ got out without looking back and Leeshawn started up the car and pulled away and SJ walked by himself up to the front door and inside.

  Two days later he called her and she picked him up and brought him directly back to her house, where she made a vodka and orange juice for herself and plain orange juice for SJ. They sat on the couch and talked, not the easiest conversation, not the least stilted that either of them had ever had, and Leeshawn brought out a photo she had kept for more than three decades, a picture of a twelve-year-old Leeshawn with a twenty-two-year-old SJ, maybe a month back from Southeast Asia, for some reason wearing his fatigues although he remembered getting them off as quickly as he could and never looking at them again. His hair was pushing outward into a good-size Afro and he wore thick-framed black glasses and a big, thick dark black mustache that curved down alongside the corners of his mouth almost to his chin. He looked at it wordlessly.

  “What happened to those glasses, J?” she said teasingly.

  “I don’t need glasses anymore except for reading. You kept this picture all this time. Out to California and back.”

  “I had a big crush on SJ from New Orleans.”

  He wanted to and he didn’t want to. Years, decades, really, putting such funds of energy, such resourcefulness, into functioning well, not blowing; the levers and gears and pulleys involved in keeping down the anger, and then the grief, stowing it; like a pain in his side it would sometimes obtrude and then his discipline, his strength, and yes his fear, fear above all that he wouldn’t be able to control the anger and the grief, pushing it back and keeping it in line. Now they stepped onto the first stepping-stone of what there was no keeping a lid on. Yes, you could turn it into a control situation, but SJ couldn’t stand that; he had been in a different place with Rosetta and it had changed him and he had never wanted to smudge or deface that memory by turning it into something simpler and coarser, and so he had acted in his mind as if he was in love with some women he never should have taken seriously, and finally ended by staying alone, paying out his time the best he could. And now after the grief, the holding even tighter, the aloneness magnified and the things he saw, this sound of caring, of undeniable humanity, this skin, this goodness that was different than Rosetta’s but good, too, in her way, the birthmark on her left cheek and her wide-set eyes, her smooth chocolate skin, and the subtle waft of scent coming off of her, part shampoo, part cologne she had put on, part her, and they threaded their right-hand fingers through each others’ fingers and SJ pulled her close to him, wanting this and not wanting this, but finally the softness in her skin and the rustle of her clothes as she moved toward him on the couch and he kissed her lips, which gave and gave back, he abandoned any attempt to hold out, he needed this contact, even if it was just to know that he was still alive and capable of this, this thing he didn’t want because he had for years carried around the certainty in his muscles and veins that it cost too much. But there was something here, he sensed, that to deny or push away would mean closing the door on his own best possibilities; if he didn’t meet this moment, he would never again have any moments worth meeting.

  Her hand found his belt buckle and slid down slightly over the bulge in his slacks, and SJ pulled himself back from driving down that road too quickly, and he took her hand and they went into her bedroom. There on the bed, suddenly nervous, or hesitant, she said, with a look half afraid, half almost hopeful, “I can still make a baby, Samuel,” and it was impossible to tell if she were warning him about using protection, or if she were sending out one vote of hope for the future, the two possibilities tangled together, and the intimacy of that moment hit him like a blast of wind, spoke to his own mixed impulses, a buried hope, a desire, a vision of a future that he had closed up like rooms in a house never to be used. He needed more than just to relieve himself, with the wind sucking the emotional door shut afterward with a slam. She needed more, too, but she found herself suddenly nervous about meeting him as an
equal, a part of her stepping back and thinking, This, finally, is SJ. The surest and most familiar path was to give pleasure. SJ saw it without naming it in his mind—the weakness or insecurity—whatever it was he needed her right there with him, one to one, and he ran his hand through her processed hair, again, and they kissed, and kissed, and he unbuttoned her blouse and unhooked her black brassiere. Her breasts were large and all but firm, with large dark-brown aureoles around the nipples, and as he bent to lick one he saw several thin black hairs sprouting from around the nipple, and one long one. He took her breast in his hand and kissed her nipple, licked it and kissed it again and heard her lightly moan. Instead of licking it some more, using her pleasure as his power, he began kissing the breast around it, licked her salty skin, starving for this, kissing the side where it bellied down near her rib cage, licked her skin, then kissed, then went back to her nipple again, which he licked and sucked and, finally, bit softly, eliciting a small yelp of surprise from her, sending her up on one elbow, pushing him down on his back by his shoulder and throwing one leg over to straddle him, both of them still dressed. Looking down at him, her skirt up and her sex pressing against his through her underwear and stockings, she removed her blouse, and her bra, and the sight of her breasts, and her graceful neck as she looked down at him inflamed him and he thrust subtly against her, rotating his hips and his own hard cock against her, holding her gaze, and she looked down at him now like a slightly mocking princess deciding whether to bestow a royal favor, and on whom, moving her own hips just slightly in answer to his motion, as if to assure him, finally now, that this was indeed a matching of equals for as long as it would last, whatever it would be, and she raised one eyebrow slightly and said, “Yes?”

  Something in her manner, her salty, resilient manner, hit him as funny, and he chuckled, slightly at first and then more; he had not been so happy for as long as he could remember. “What are you laughing at, Mister Man,” she said, in a fake menacing whisper, falling forward slightly and placing her hands on his shoulders, pinning him down. This made him laugh a little harder, a rumbling chuckle that came from his stomach. What, indeed, was so funny? He didn’t know, but he recovered himself; too much of a laugh discharged the tension that gave intensity to sex, after all, and he put his hands on her hips and pressed against her harder and said, “I’m laughing at you thinking you can wrestle me.”