The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  Some of this damage looks new, probably a result of the most recent storm. The way the blond wood juts out in the broken beams along the canal walls. The way the paint of a large container shines brightly from where it now lies awkwardly on its side.

  But most of the damage is clearly very old. Accumulated over the course of storms and many years or decades of inattention.

  There are offshoots from the canal. But I stay on what I think is the main route north. I can look over my shoulder and, usually, see the top of my hotel. Even my room, at the corner.

  The sound of the motor echoes in on me in the canal. I leave some wake and move at what might be five miles an hour. I’m not in a hurry.

  It’s about twenty minutes before I come upon a broken levee, an earthen wall with a missing section thirty feet across. The water on the other side of the levee is as still as the water in the canal.

  I cross through the break in the levee. I’m not sure what this water covers. A park, maybe. A school. All lost to the water.

  I’m sure that I’ve been here. Before it was flooded.

  In a few minutes of moving north, I find another break in a levee, cross through it, and enter another canal. I take the boat out of gear, floating forward only slowly as I pause to take note of where I left the canal, of the markings on the side of a warehouse, of a clump of three tall, dead trees. The series of canals and levees in this area is complicated, I know, and only more so now that the levees have failed.

  A bridge behind me crosses the canal, its heavy stanchions topped by stone lions’ heads, large pedestals at each end topped by full-sized stone lions. Guards, it seems. Architectural excesses in a land that no longer asks for ornaments or protection.

  I cross through breaks in the levees every few minutes. The water is still and flat and I can’t tell how deep it is. There are more buildings now. Brick. Stores and offices and low apartments built along the edge of the water and I realize that probably the buildings were once along the edge of a canal, but the water from the levee flooded the area, breaking down one side of the canal, so that now the buildings seem to be built alongside of a small lake.

  Looking back, I can no longer see my hotel, so I take out my compass to make sure that I’m still moving north.

  I come around the side of a brick warehouse then and see a neighborhood. The top end at least. Roofs of houses and the tops of trees and utility poles with power lines strung out, all sitting in the still water, a mile of this or more.

  It’s an image I’ve seen before. Video footage of flood-ravaged areas. Images I would see so many times over so many years, back when I watched TV. The flooding of distant places. Rising tides along populated foothills. Unexpected deluges in nations long racked by drought.

  News of massive damage and life-changing relocations that I watched, at most, from the corner of my eye.

  Here, though, there is no sense that the flood will ever recede.

  The water reaches halfway up the second story of the homes, leaving the neighborhood frozen at its base. Black, slick oaks stick up from the water too, branches reaching out and up forty feet or more. These were tree-lined streets, shaded by oaks and maples in summer, turned red and gold and orange in the fall. There were flowers in the yards beneath this water, bursting white and pink and red throughout the spring. There were long avenues marked by these once grand houses and yards. There were narrow side streets with small bungalows built more than a hundred years ago.

  The water does not move. Even the wind doesn’t seem to touch it.

  Those floods on the TV seemed very far away.

  This, though, is a neighborhood I know. From childhood. Where I had family, cousins, an aunt and uncle. I played here. I know the street names on green metal signs that hang from the tall utility poles at what were once busy intersections.

  When I got in the boat, I had thoughts of going all the way to the bay. Now, though, here, I realize I can’t go any farther.

  Because this is where I grew up.

  And this is where we later lived.

  This is where they all died.

  We moved back to the North End because we thought it was right. Schools and jobs were already in the south. But we moved back to an old and grand and beautiful house, worked on it, fixed it up. Stayed committed to a block, a neighborhood, to others who were like us. Fierce defenders of the North End.

  The trees hadn’t died yet. There were animals here still. Spiders in the windowsills. Ants moving in lines along the sidewalk.

  I tell myself my family died because of where we lived. Because of the choice we made. To stay with this place, in this place, no matter what else happened. No matter the dangers others saw.

  We knew the fire department was nearly absent. Knew the ambulances no longer had means to respond.

  We stayed here anyway.

  I lined their bodies up in the street in front of the house. Blackened, wrecked, and broken.

  And still no one had come. Except the neighbors. All the neighbors. The people who believed in staying. Standing side by side. Staring at the fire, the bodies, me.

  And still no one had come.

  Even the news helicopter that circled the street, spotlight on me as they filmed the scene, it stayed for a very few minutes.

  When they died, I left. To the South End. For almost a year. Tried to continue my life, but alone.

  It didn’t work.

  I sometimes thought that it was just too loud there in the South End. If it hadn’t been so loud, all the people, the cars, the televisions and the radios, if not for that I tell myself I could have made it. Started a new life. Recovered and moved on.

  But that, I realize here, floating on this water, above my old neighborhood, that is a lie. I could not have made it in the South End. I could not have made it anywhere.

  Instead, I came back to the North End. Where it’s silent. And of course I have not moved on. Of course I am not recovered.

  I float slowly forward, the boat pushing through the still, cold water.

  When they died, within months, everyone on that block left. Everyone gave up. Everyone gave in to the deepest fears we always shared.

  In the boat, I’ve found the street we lived on. It’s not hard, even with the flooding. There are the tops of houses that I recognize. Church spires and school buildings that I’ve known since I was young.

  The house stands like the others, submerged in the still water. Water inside the broken windows. Water inside the holes that burned through the second-story walls. The roofline is twisted upward, out, mangled still by the fire, and what shows above the waterline is black, all black, no color or shine.

  I’ve turned off the engine. I float, motionless, above what must have been the street. Above what must have been the curb. Above what must have been the place where I last touched them after they had died.

  • • •

  Back near my hotel, in the darkness of a neighborhood very near my building, I burn down a house.

  A house the same size as ours. Two stories, but not wide. Wooden siding and brick along the foundation.

  I find paint thinner in the basement. Pour it into a metal bucket filled with stray pieces of wood—a broken handrail, a curtain rod, a broom handle, the remnants of a chair. In a moment, I can watch the firelight and shadows on the basement walls and the wooden beams above me. The fire is contained in the bucket. It seems for some minutes that it will not spread. That it will soon die out.

  But it doesn’t.

  The bucket cracks open and the wood, just smoldering, tumbles onto the floor. In another minute it lights stray cardboard nearby. The flames soon reach the cabinets along the wall, curtains on the basement windows, napkins and books lining a set of shelves nearby.

  It’s hot now. Bright. I’m still counting the minutes, forty-five, since I first lit the fire in the bucket.

  And as I sit across the street, in darkness except for the light of the fire growing, now it has been an hour and a half. That’s h
ow long it took. And I sit, and stare, and count once more to ninety, and it’s quite some time now that I’ve been crying.

  • • •

  At the library the next day, I find maps of the canals and levees. I retrace the areas I went to in the boat. I mark the broken levees on the map. I measure the distance from the warehouse to the first of the broken levees that I found. I calculate the area of the neighborhoods now covered by all that water.

  In history books about the growth of the city, I find pictures of my neighborhood from many decades ago. I take pictures of those photos with my camera. Then I sort through the photos I took from the boat as I made my way back downtown, trying to find ones that roughly match the view and perspective of the pictures in the history books.

  A busy street packed with trolley cars and pedestrians and people pushing strollers along a tree-lined avenue. Now the slick branches of those same trees stick out from the still water.

  A movie theater and surrounding crowd lit with the bright bulbs on the large marquee. Now that marquee slides at an angle into the water.

  Before and after.

  The next day I write this all up for the paper. I run ten photographs this time, the most I’ve ever printed. I also run two maps of flooded areas and, in my rough, bad handwriting, I carefully make notes on the big map, marking the distance between the floodwaters and downtown.

  Two miles.

  • • •

  I’m watching the gardener and the minister pull a teenage kid from a jacked-up car. The gardener holds him down on the concrete, his knee in the kid’s back. The minister goes to the other door. Reaches through the open window to grab the driver by the neck. He goes halfway through the window, both arms, his head and chest seemingly on top of the kid who had been driving. A kid who’d been speeding, doing burnouts, roaring back and forth along this central avenue near the corner store, the kid shooting a gun at trees and at buildings along the road.

  I’m watching from the steps of the old church across the street. Other people, maybe ten of them, they are watching too.

  I know I’ll help the minister and gardener if they need me.

  But it seems to be going fine for them.

  The gardener stopped the car after it made its tenth or eleventh pass. He walked out into the street. Stood there. As the car came racing toward him. The driver finally slammed on the brakes. Leaned out the window. Started yelling at the gardener who, still, only stood in the street. Staring at the car, the driver and passenger, here in the cold, slow rain of this day, as gray as it gets here, monotone in the daylight and silent throughout the North End, with only the sound of the kid’s engine and his passenger yelling and the kid honking the horn at the gardener.

  The minister then, that’s when he goes after the passenger, pulling open the door, dragging him out and the gardener helping him and the driver, staring now, not saying anything, he only watches as the gardener pins down his friend, as the minister, in a black shirt, black pants, no collar but I think that kid probably knows he’s a minister anyway, that’s when the minister turns back to the car, the driver, and that’s when the minister goes through the window.

  Both kids are quite bloody by the time it’s over. They drive away very slowly.

  I think probably the minister made them promise.

  I see the gardener drop a gun down a sewer drain.

  You can hear the car’s engine for another minute, long after the car has turned the corner. Long after the people here near the corner store have gone back to what they were doing. Silent mostly, a few nodding to the minister and the gardener.

  Really, we just want our lives back. We want things to be how they once were.

  • • •

  We are not innately violent here. The violence fled with the last of the city’s government and people and the structures that once defined how we should and should not live.

  I write this up for the paper.

  And where does this new violence come from? How is it that a gardener and a minister find such violence necessary? What makes us respond to these outsiders in such a terrible, dangerous way?

  “I see this, feel it, and know it can’t continue,” I quote the gardener saying.

  “I wonder about the cost in and to myself,” I quote the minister saying.

  What is it, though, that causes us to go to such ends to defend this place?

  Is it just that we want our lives back? Is it just that we want things to be how they once had been?

  • • •

  The commissioner attends the next meeting. It’s been at least three months. There are many people from the North End at this meeting. Sixty or more attend, ten or more ask questions.

  What will be done about the violence?

  The commission members sit silently through this. They look more irritated than they’ve ever been. Frustrated again that they must be part of this.

  Sometimes they simply shake their heads. Sometimes they lean back and stare up at the ceiling. But mostly, for the hour they are required to be here, they only stare out at us.

  After the meeting, the commissioner comes up to me. “I’m sorry I haven’t been here for some time,” she says, and my sense of her as a generic figure in a suit is different now. I’ve seen her scared.

  It takes me a moment to respond. I say, “You don’t have to apologize to me.”

  “I needed to rethink what I could do for the North End,” she says. Then she is silent. She shakes her head. “And I was afraid.”

  I realize she’s not as tall as she was. She’s not wearing the high heels.

  She taps her hand on her purse, nervous or impatient, I can’t tell. In a moment, she says, “The problem is that you are not alone with this. On that point, the commissioners aren’t exaggerating. It’s a problem in the South End. And a growing one. That we have no idea how to solve.”

  “They have no purpose,” I say. “Nothing to do.”

  “And they have guns,” she says. “And cars. And each other. Which becomes their purpose. It becomes all they know and all that matters.”

  I look away from her, seeing people slowly leaving the community center. The only sound is the shuffling of their feet. No one speaks.

  “I don’t think I care about those kids,” I say. “About their problems. Or the South End’s.” I turn back to her. “I know enough to realize that I should be a person who cares. But I’m not.”

  There’s a moment where she looks at me very differently. Wary. Wondering what I might do. She’s seen me beat a man till he was bloody.

  “I was not always like this,” I hear myself say, quietly I think, and I am wondering if I’ve actually said this aloud or if I only thought it in my mind.

  “I know,” she says now.

  I am staring at her. Suit and hair and skin that all seem colorless, a hue or range I can’t manage to identify. And yet I’ve seen her scared.

  “I know,” she says again.

  I find myself nodding. Unexpectedly.

  “I’ve read the stories,” she says, almost silently, or maybe it’s that I can barely hear anything at all. “About you,” she says, and I think now that maybe I’ve only imagined that she’s said this. “And about them,” I hear her say and now I know I’ve heard those words. Know that she has said them. “Everyone knows your story,” she says. “Yours is what everyone in the South End fears. That this place will kill them and their families and everyone they know and everything they have ever loved.”

  But still I am only nodding. Then moving away. Then walking out into the night.

  CHAPTER 8

  There is only one way from the South End to the north. Only one overpass linking the two parts of this place.

  There is only one way for trouble to come to us, I write in the paper. But if we take control of the overpass, we can end the trouble.

  The article I write is small, just three paragraphs, on the inside of the paper. There is no byline. The headline says only, TAKING CONTROL OF THE OVERP
ASS.

  The next week, someone runs a notice in the paper. It’s not signed, only dropped through the mail slot at the office. A public meeting will be held, on the steps of the church downtown, to discuss taking over the overpass.

  Nearly three hundred people attend. It is raining and blowing hard outside and so the minister invites everyone inside the church. The ceilings are vaulted, stone columns lifting upward to stone beams, the walls of the sanctuary lined with dark stained glass. The disciples gathered at the base of a tree, a god rising with the sunrise beyond a hill.

  Murals on the altar shine with gold paint, silver, sunlight across so many outstretched hands.

  It isn’t warm here and the lights in the sanctuary don’t work on the west side. And so we gather in the pews on the east side of the church.

  There are scavengers and older couples and people whose names I do not know but who I see getting a newspaper from in front of the office every week.

  More people arrive. There are nearly four hundred now.

  I see the office manager. Sitting near the back of the room.

  I see the pressman. Standing near the front.

  I see brokers and vendors and the security guard from the airport.

  I see the woman who works at the water pumping station.

  I see the garbage man who picks up trash cans once a week.

  I see scavengers, forty of them, together near the back of the sanctuary, all of them standing along the wall.

  The sounds in the room are loud but muffled, indistinct talking and the scrape of shoes and boots on the stone floor. The rough slide of chairs being repositioned in the aisles near the pews.

  It is not clear who is in charge of the meeting. Soon there are simply discussions, between various people in various groups, all over the room. Other people do not speak at all.

  The minister finally says, his voice lifting loud from the front of the church, “How will we organize this?” He is standing on a pew. No one has gone up to the altar, where they could see the whole group and speak with more authority.