“We can get us a lil’ TV in here maybe?” It’s the new dishwasher again. “It don’t make no sense on the radio.”
“True enough, friend,” Warren agrees. He looks up from the bowl of dry rub he’s concocting. “Whaddya say, Miss Ariel? Mighten we get a TV for the hurricane’s arrival?”
Ariel doesn’t see why not. But it’s her immediate leverage. “Lots of No Rezes today so far,” she tells them. The hotel is filling up with people coming in off the streets. “Maybe. Keep prepping.”
“A Nazi boss,” one of the passing ice guys says, tossing a smile at Ariel.
Javier catches Ariel’s eye. The bad word seems to entice him somehow. He could be into bondage secretly. Ariel supposes she could tie him up and kiss him all over his back while he ground his beautiful hips into the sheets. “Damn straight,” she says loudly.
Warren shoots her a look like, You’re learning, girlfriend.
Best Ariel leave the kitchen without much more said and stay on their good side.
Another round of dollies, and the ice is finally in. “Sign, Chef?”
“Yup.”
It’s the first time she’ll have spent the night in the hotel since her interview.
She’s going home at some point soon. She has a house to finish securing. And a bag to pack. Rite Aid sits at the corner of St. Charles and Louisiana for what she might not have already.
9
Elizabeth’s thin brown arm pokes out the side window of the Guptas’ minivan in front of them. She waves and waves back at Ed, Miles, and Ella, her pink palm fluttering. Ed taps out a greeting on his horn.
Their cars sit, unmoving as stones, in gridlock. Most of the people around them, Ed included, have turned off their engines. Better for the environment. And the car. And gas. Not more than an eighth of a mile ago, when they still crawled along, they passed a red-haired man holding a handwritten sign over his head on the highway’s shoulder, leaning on the back of an old Lincoln: gas please name your price.
“Da-ad,” Miles says in the coveted passenger seat beside Ed.
Whatever Miles might be berating Ed for now, he doesn’t know. The horn beeping?
“Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease?”
What does his son want? “What. Miles.”
Miles says something back, but Ed can’t hear him with their windows rolled down. An enormous black SUV the size of a small school bus idles menacingly beside them to their right. What could that thing get—seven, eight miles to the gallon? The vehicles disgust Ed normally, but this one blares rap music loud enough to deafen the people who lounge inside, the engine running, the blackened windows all up. He can’t hear his own son sitting beside him over the din.
Ella rhythmically pushes her feet into Ed’s kidneys from her car seat behind him. She’s long known the spot for maximum impact. “Yes. Ella.”
“Me too!” Ella screams.
“You too what?’
A back, darkened window of the SUV whirs down slowly. The music has to be doing damage to the passengers’ ears. A man with strange teeth—are they gold?—grins at Miles and bobs his head. Miles begins bobbing in imitation immediately.
Ed leans forward and twiddles his fingers at the man. Ed’s attempting a French assassin’s calm demeanor, but really he wants to try to hear what the rap is saying.
As if he reads Ed’s mind, the man in the SUV says over the noise, “Lil Wayne.” The window goes up again, but the rap is perfectly audible, if Ed could actually understand it. He strains to listen carefully and thinks he catches some of it:
“… drop your knees … won’t be long … I don’t use rubbers …”
What an absolutely asinine thing to rap about! All young people should be using condoms. Every single time. Why would somebody brag about that? He might as well be rapping about how brave he is to play Russian roulette!
Miles picks up on the refrain, belting out, “Drop it like it’s hot, drop, drop it like it’s hot!”
Deflect. Redirect. “Miles. Miles! What did you want to do? The pleasepleaseplease thing?”
Miles keeps up with his own refrain, falling out of sync with the one coming from the SUV. “Drop drop drop it when it’s hot, drop it drop it when it’s hot, drop it when it’s hot.”
Three teenage black girls saunter up, two carrying a cooler and the other the biggest bag of potato chips Ed has ever seen. They dance along the white line between the SUV and Ed’s car. They stop and gyrate next to Miles, who stops his singsonging and stares. All three girls wear very, very short shorts. Potato chip girl suddenly flops over in time with the rap and bends herself in half. She jiggles her raised butt in rhythm to the refrain. Ed’s stomach flips when he realizes he is staring at the outline of the large girl’s vulva.
And then they’re off. The girls stop at the back of a weird SUV–pickup truck hybrid ahead of the SUV by another two cars.
A row of police vehicles speeds by in the opposite direction, heading towards New Orleans.
Miles starts to bob his head again.
The girls wriggle and dance. They elicit honks and hollers.
“Cool,” Miles says.
“What part?” Ed asks.
“You know.”
Ed doesn’t know. Not at all. He has no idea what part of anything Miles has just witnessed is cool. It could all be, or none of it could be. Cool. Ed’s concerned that this is something he should be able to discern without asking.
“Daddy?” Ella asks.
“Yes, love?”
“How come they did that?”
Ed thinks he knows right away what his daughter is after but doesn’t want to address it. “What do you mean, Ella?”
Up ahead, an old fat beige man exits his car. He holds a beige poodle in his arms. The man could be of any heritage on earth for all Ed knows. Beige is beige. He’s just a human. Holding a dog.
The beige man puts the beige dog on the ground. It’s old and shaky and clearly not doing so well.
“A dog!” Ella calls out, and Ed thanks Buddha for the diversion. Ella will work her way back around to her question, maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, maybe a month from now when she witnesses some other impromptu bit of booty-grinding, but for now she’s happy enough to watch an old dog on the side of an old highway full of parked cars.
The dog sniffs the owner’s car tire and lifts its leg.
Twisting in his privileged front seat position, Miles tells Ella, “It’s a boy dog.”
“It’s peeing on the tire!” Ella yells.
Ed can’t ignore the shuddering SUV. Certainly what he thinks he hears can’t be what he really hears: “stuffed you in the ass—” How can a highway have turned into a tailgating party? What wonderful phrases will Miles learn today if they’re forced to remain here? And Ella … if Ella starts talking about slappin’ a ho, Ed’s going to lose it.
“—dick like a python—”
Ed rubs his hand over his greasy face. He can feel a rivulet of sweat find his crack.
“Like a python!” Miles bobs his head till it looks like he could fling it off his neck. “That’s—a—snake!” Miles informs Ella.
“Ewww!” Ella squeals, stomping Ed’s kidneys.
The beige man watches his dog piss on the rear tire of his own car, and Ed glances up at the three girls by the fender of the hybrid. Two teenage boys have come out to join Potato Chip and the Coolers. The boys snap their fingers over their heads and nod while they look up and down the rows of stuck cars. It seems, clearly, that they’re the best thing going for all the visible gridlock around.
The back window of the SUV whirs down again. The smell of marijuana wafts Ed’s way. Gold Teeth nods with squinty eyes at Miles. “A lil’ solja,” he says. “Dap.” The man extends his muscled arm and tight dark fist far out his window toward Miles.
Ed doesn’t understand what’s going on. Maybe the man’s passing Miles a joint. A seven-year-old boy. “Hey,” Ed says, “do what you want in your own car, but that’s not for my son,” just as Mil
es makes his own fist and butts it into Gold Teeth’s.
The man smiles and nods at Miles. “Dat’s right.” He pulls his arm back in his window and frowns at Ed. “What you think I’ma do?” The window goes up.
Ed’s certain he can hear laughter beneath the thump of the eardrum-bursting rap. Lil Wayne, the guy said. Ed’ll have to look him up on the internet.
“So can I?” Miles asks.
“Can you what?”
“Me too,” Ella says.
“What?”
“Go to the Guptas’ car.”
Ed realizes they’ve seen more than just the girl trio and dog man get out of their cars and move around. The cars have been stopped for nearly half an hour. The stretching, the standing accompanied by neck-craning, began at least twenty minutes ago.
“Pleasepleaseplease—” Miles begs, his brain turning to jello in his bouncing skull.
“Miles, stop that.”
He stops. “Please?”
“What if the cars start moving again. Then what will we do?” Ed can see they wouldn’t be the only ones needing to regroup. He’s just not sure he should bother the Guptas right now. It’s nice enough of them to extend the offer to stay at the motel in Breaux Bridge, making sure that their in-laws saved an extra room for Ed and the kids. He’s happy, at this point, that the black SUV isn’t stopped next to the Guptas’ minivan.
“We could ride with them,” Miles answers.
“William pulled my hair,” Ella says.
“Nuh-uh.” Miles twists in his seat.
“Yeah-huh,” Ella says.
“He did not.” Miles unbuckles his seat belt. “You’re making that up because you wanted William to pull your hair.”
“He did so!”
Ed reaches to turn on the radio. He’d sworn he wouldn’t turn it on, afraid the kids would feel his anxiety. His fingers rest on the button. “You want music?” he asks.
“Nuh-uh!” Miles says again and lunges between the seats at his sister.
“Daddy!” Ella kicks at Miles and manages to catch his chin with a hard one.
Miles bites his lip and goes at Ella again. Ed blocks him with a fast arm. “You keep up this sort of behavior, and you can both stay in your seats till kingdom come.” Kingdom come? Where the hell did he pull that one from? Confirmation class? “Alright. Let’s take a break.”
In the rearview, Ella sticks her tongue out at her brother, and Ed sees Ariel in the gesture, through and through. He’s so completely disgusted with his wife’s place of employment right now he can hardly think it all through logically. Who in the world separates a woman from her family during a hurricane evacuation? “Miles, be careful getting out your side.”
Miles swings open his door wide and is out of the car. Ed grabs ineffectually at his shirt, missing any piece of Miles at all.
“Daddy!” Ella whomps on Ed’s kidneys for the umpteenth time. Ed has sworn he will never, ever call her on it. It’s her sole means of exerting any kind of power, trapped in a child seat in a vehicle she doesn’t drive.
“Hang on, Fitzy.”
Ed opens his door and steps out while Miles beelines it to the Guptas’ minivan.
Heading back toward New Orleans, an ambulance races past on the other side of the highway. Ed really wants to listen to the news. Maybe he can have an adult conversation with Ganesh and Indira while the kids play. On the highway. Or in the tall median grass where snakes and used needles hide.
It’s so, so hot.
By the time Ed opens Ella’s door, she’s unbuckled herself. She reaches out to Ed, the gesture that always turns up some daddy dial inside him, some inherent protective knob that gets cranked to high when Ella’s little hands come at him to help her or hold her.
If he had to, Ed would kill the men in the SUV for Ella. And for Miles too, of course.
“Let’s take a break, hey?” he says to his daughter.
“Let’s take a break,” she says back.
Indira gets out of the driver’s seat. “Good idea,” she says to Ed as he approaches with Ella. Miles opens the sliding door to the minivan and crawls inside.
Ganesh steps out. “Well, we might be in for it.”
“Might?” Ed asks, and the three of them laugh.
“Ella, there are games inside,” Indira says, and Ella crawls into the car over the Guptas’ driver seat.
“Sorry,” Ed says.
“Whatever for?” Indira says, passing her upturned palm around to indicate the state of things around them.
Ed smiles. “Thanks. You hear the SUV next to us?”
“Baton Rouge hears it,” Ganesh says.
They all nod with the unspoken. They are, the three of them, Ed decides on the spot, sensitive and wise people. Louisiana has a reputation that perpetuates itself for good reason. We choose diversity, Ed thinks. We choose a European approach to living. We care about more than money, and our communal culture stems from an acceptance of everyone’s differences.
One of the male friends of the girl trio stands up in the back of the hybrid truck bed and then steps onto the roof of the cab. Ed waits to hear the metal oomp of the cab top bending inward, but he can’t over the rest of the noise. The kid seems to be legitimately trying to check out the traffic. Ed wouldn’t mind a little feedback.
The boy must feel eyes on him. He hitches up his sagging pants, then pushes them half the way back down again. He raises a hand to his brow and scans the road behind everyone then turns a hundred eighty degrees and looks ahead. The road goes quieter for the boy’s report.
He wears a pick in his afro, one of a few Ed’s noticed the last few months. Maybe the natural look really is taking hold, even in New Orleans.
The boy shakes his head exaggeratedly. He turns around and runs his own flat hand across his throat, then gives the finger.
They’re all dead-screwed.
A communal groan sounds out from the road.
Ed gives the boy a thumbs-up thank-you. “You know,” he says to Indira and Ganesh, “one of my biggest worries with all of this is getting stuck on the road when the hurricane hits.”
“I know,” Ganesh says. “I want to go for it and drive in the median.”
Ed is surprised by the admission. He nods. “Better still, why don’t we all just get over there?” Ed points to the deserted other side of the highway. Except for emergency vehicles, it’s been empty for hours already. “I’m dying to get going.”
Indira nods in agreement. “So much road wasted.”
The minivan waggles with the movement of children inside. “It does seem,” Ganesh says, “that there’s a better plan here somewhere.”
“You’d think so,” Ed says, looking around, the heat turning the infinite line of cars ahead into a swimmy mirage. “You’d really think so.”
The SUV goes mercifully silent for a few seconds before another rap begins: “… you workin’ with some ass … make a nigga—”
Ed feels his face warm with a blush. How can a person pretend he doesn’t hear that? He can’t imagine ignoring the noise, those lyrics, indefinitely.
They really need to get moving.
Four hours later, they have driven twenty-seven miles, with a hundredplus to go. Ed glances at the speedometer. They go so slowly their speed doesn’t register.
Miles has peed into a flip-topped Tupperware pitcher packed expressly for just such a purpose. Carrying a spare sari—or fabric that looked pretty enough to be one—Indira took both the girls into the grass a couple hours ago, setting up a little latrine, blocking the view creeps might have had from the road.
Now Ella sleeps in her car seat, and Miles’ fascination with the pitcher of piss has finally waned. It sloshes quietly, tucked in on the floor behind Miles. Pouring it out while everyone inches along simply isn’t an option.
They have escaped the black SUV for the time being. When Ed drove past the broken-down car in the lane ahead of the SUV, he sent out his second prayer of thanks for the day.
Miles stares i
nto the credit-card-sized screen of a handheld computerized game Elizabeth has loaned him. The repetitive music that plays over and over has Miles in its hypnotic grip. The boy’s mouth hangs open as he stabs with his thumbs.
Ed wants nothing more than to crush the thing in his bare hands. Certainly the batteries can last only so long.
He sighs loudly. His minimal Buddhism training is wilting further with each passing month in Louisiana. He can’t remember the wording of the lesson he wants right now, the one about why we tend to be afraid of what we don’t understand. He doesn’t have the proper headspace to even try. He should at least reconnect with his son. Since the swearing last night, Miles has felt far away. The SUV didn’t help today.
“Why does the music stop and start over like that?” Ed asks.
Miles doesn’t respond.
“Miles?”
“Just a minute!”
They roll past an obese man in a plaid shirt driving a ’50s Caddy. His backseat is full to bursting with life belongings. Ed hopes they’ve not made a dire mistake by not packing photos, by not having gone to their safety deposit box for important papers. And then his insides contract. He very much hopes they have not made the most irreversible and preventable mistake by not getting Ariel in the car too. What would his life be without her? What would Ella’s or Miles’?
Ed suddenly wants to sob. He should have fought harder. She could find another job. Or he could go back to work. This year, with Ella being gone at school a full day too, he has significant time on his hands. Or they both could work, but work less. Spend more time together.
The tinny tune on the game starts over again.
“What are you trying to do on that?” Ed tries again.
“Errr!” Miles growls, and the music begins fresh immediately. “Collect mushrooms!”
“Shh. Your sister’s sleeping. But I know that one. It’s retro. Do you know that expression? Retro. On Ms. Pac-Man I bet I could kick your butt when we get to the hotel.”
“Daddy,” Ella says, very awake. “Daddy, I gotta go.”
“Loser,” Miles said. “It’s Super Mario Brothers.”
What did Miles just call him?
“Daddy. Right now.”
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