The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  • • •

  The gardener has many questions for me about the canals and the levees and how they were originally designed. We meet in the atrium of the old library, where I pull old maps from the files of public records. Survey maps and schematics showing the emergency plans, showing how levees were built to funnel water away from the city. I mark as best I can the levees that are broken, the places where water has advanced.

  There are news articles from decades ago, some from newspapers and others from engineering journals. The gardener stacks them all up. “Can I use this table?” he asks me, then smiles some. “Right,” he says. “Of course I can.”

  • • •

  The woman and her boy have a large yard behind their building. It’s along one of the main canals downtown, so that the grass they’ve planted and the shrubs and ivy, it grows right up to the edge of the water. The yard is bordered by brick walls on both sides, the building on the other. There are archways in each brick wall, with iron gates swung open, and I see that the yard on one side has started to be planted.

  “I’m helping them,” the woman says, looking through the archway.

  The other archway opens onto a small playground. A swing set and monkey bars. “The scavengers have been very kind to me,” she says.

  There is a rope swing, too, strung from a heavy, dead tree that stands along the edge of the canal. The boy swings on it, standing, his feet on a big knot at the end of the rope, he can pump his legs and swing over their yard, then out ten feet above the canal.

  The woman and I stand watching him. It’s quiet here.

  “The places we went,” she says now, quietly. “They offered no better escape.”

  I nod.

  The boy swings. Forward then back.

  It’s a while before she nods too.

  “You should tell my story,” she says now. “My boy’s story. How we ended up here. What they did to us in the South End.”

  I say in a moment, “I thought you’d want that kept private.”

  She nods. Pushes her hair behind her ear. Blinks her dark eyes. “I did. But then I saw those photos. Your photos. Of the night of the storm. The highway and ladders. People will never forget that night. And they’ll never forget those photos.”

  The boy sways, silently, the branch reaching out over the canal.

  The woman has turned to look at me. “They should know what was done to people like us. And they should never forget that either.”

  • • •

  The commission meets. For the first time in many months. The community center is filled with a few hundred people from the North End.

  I stand near the side of the room, notebook open. There are scavengers along the wall behind me. The minister is near the front, sitting next to the gardener and the commissioner. There are people from houseboats and from the market downtown and faces I’ve seen walking along the streets of the North End.

  The woman is here, with her boy, the two of them standing near the back.

  I wrote up her story this past week. Her story of this commission, these men and women, moving to take her neighborhood, her home, her boy.

  “You’ll see us return the South End to normal,” says one of the commissioners, an old, bald man who now calls himself the chief commissioner. “You’re already seeing the highway reopen. And then you’ll see the overpass to this place and the power we provide you, you’ll see that all cut off completely.”

  There is silence from the crowd. In a moment, the gardener stands. “Why is this place of any concern to you? Why do you want so badly to shut this place down?”

  “Because,” the chief commissioner says, loudly, nearly yelling, and he leans forward, his hand up, finger out, pointing at the gardener, “it is places like this and people like you that distract us from the work we should really be doing. The support of good people and good places, that’s what we should be providing.”

  “Like the woman and her boy?” says the commissioner, from her seat next to the gardener.

  The commissioners all turn to her, staring with looks of disdain and surprise and in some cases it seems they look at her with hatred.

  She was one of them once, turned now to the other side.

  I doubt the commissioners know about the woman and her boy. Certainly they’ve not read my story about them.

  “I don’t care about some woman or some boy here in the North End,” says the chief commissioner, again leaning forward, staring angrily toward the commissioner and the gardener and now looking around at everyone in the room, trying, it seems, to meet the stare of all three hundred people here, all of us in a room that just three months ago was used after the storm to care for people from the North End and South End and places far away. “I don’t care about them,” he says. “I don’t care about you. All I want is for all of you to go away.”

  He’s met with silence, which seems to make him angrier. He leans back, then leans forward. He seems to try to find more words that will better express his hatred for us, this place, for everything he sees and feels.

  The minister stands up, next to the gardener. He’s smiling slightly. A crooked smile crosses his dense face and he cups his small hands to his mouth. In a moment, he says loudly, “Boo!”

  The chief commissioner leans back, staring at the minister in his black shirt and black pants.

  The minister says again, with his hands still at his mouth, “Boo!”

  The gardener, standing next to him, can only stare at the minister, slowly looking him up and down, this compact man in black, his dark eyes bright as he continues to boo the commissioners.

  And then the gardener starts to laugh. He laughs loudly. He slaps his hands against his knees, bent over.

  The minister has it going steadily. “Boo!”

  The gardener joins him. The commissioner and the people around them, standing all of them, they join too.

  Boo.

  Others begin to stand and the commissioners at their table at the front of the room, they lean back, staring from person to person in the crowd, all of whom are also standing.

  Boo.

  Yet there’s no anger in it. No hatred or mass aggression of the crowd. People smile, stand, and boo.

  The noise, it gets louder.

  The commissioners lean back farther, pushing their chairs away from the table, and one of them stands.

  The noise is still louder, shaking the windows and the floor, and the crowd is all standing, booing, and the booing is changing. It’s a kind of yell, happy, a sound guttural and instinctive and there is clapping now and cheering and all the commissioners are standing up, looking from the crowd to each other, and in a moment one of them begins to leave the stage, moving forward toward the aisle and the cheering now, the screaming, the clapping and shifting in place that almost seems to have become a dance, it all rises with the roar of the voices.

  The commissioners are leaving, the aisle kept open for them, there’s no jeering, no taunting or anger. There is only the still rising cheer of the crowd.

  A celebration, I write down. You can only call it a celebration.

  • • •

  The water on the highway continues slowly to recede, though even three months later there is an inch of filthy water on the surface of the road.

  The cars and trucks and the rotted carcasses of dead animals, they are all still where they were left. The human bodies too.

  But word spreads that a set of bulldozers and cranes is beginning to make its way along the highway. I go to the overpass to see them. Moving through the center of the vehicles, slowly making their way toward us.

  Cars are pushed to the side. Cranes lift trucks and even small trailers, then drop them onto vehicles in the neighboring lanes. Bulldozers pair up and begin pushing against massive buses. The highway is so packed with abandoned vehicles that the bulldozers and cranes can barely move forward.

  Dead people are removed. By men or women in hazmat suits, hooded and wearing gloves, they put the bo
dies into bags and slide them into a van behind the crane and bulldozers.

  Slowly, over many days, two lanes are formed. One in each direction.

  Why forming lanes would be a priority for anyone in charge, I don’t know. But a great deal of effort is being made.

  In another few weeks, traffic starts to move on the highway, cars and heavy trucks and sometimes buses. The traffic moves slowly, starting and stopping often, reaching just ten miles an hour at most, the drivers and passengers all staring to the left and then right, studying the landscape of destruction through which they now pass.

  • • •

  “I’d like to take you somewhere,” the woman says. “Show you something. Something the scavengers have been working on.”

  We walk down the street. The boy is in front of us, tiptoeing carefully but quickly on a faded yellow line in the street. He follows it to the right, toward a set of taller buildings, three of them eight stories high.

  “There are many more scavengers,” the woman says as we walk. “There have always been more of them, maybe five hundred or six hundred, more than anyone knew.”

  The boy leads us to the middle building, one of three old brick buildings, each with windows six across.

  Inside, the building has been gutted, the floors removed, by rain or a storm or the efforts of the scavengers who have taken over the place. The basement is exposed, three floors deep, and we stand at the edge, a set of heavy horizontal bars forming a railing. I look down and then up, leaning against the rail, seeing scavengers, twenty of them at least, climbing up and down a mass of beams and the thick black branches of dead trees, branches brought here and attached to each other and to the walls, and there are cables stretched at angles too, strung from one brick wall to the next, the coordinated tangle rising to the very top of the open building where a set of nets covers the opening.

  “There are birds here,” I say, dumbly, because that is most obvious to anyone who enters.

  I can’t tell how many birds there are. Hundreds, maybe a thousand, of all types, and I realize that there’s a thin, nearly invisible net strung up in front of us, reaching from the basement to the ceiling, and I see that parts of the building, horizontal sections, are cut off from one another by more thin nets, segmented into separate areas of separate types of birds. I see finches and I see blue jays and I see robins and high above there is a hawk.

  I step back from the edge. Arms at my sides, mouth open, not sure I can breathe.

  There are trees and shrubs and flowers planted throughout the carefully tangled structures that rise up to the eighth floor. Platforms have been built to hold beds of dirt, and ivy curls its way up various beams and a huge tree trunk, slick and black like all the dead trees here, it is suspended midway up the building and has been carved out in places to let other plants grow from it.

  “They’ve been working on this for years,” the woman says, standing near me, and like me she stands back, staring up. “All of them, the scavengers, they spend time here, tending to this place and to the animals they’ve brought here.”

  The boy begins to run along the edge overlooking the basement, his hand brushing against the bars. He tumbles and rolls now, but soon he is only running, his arms out straight from his sides, and as he runs the birds begin to make even more noise, whistling and squawking and some launch from their perches below us, the motion spreading upward from section to section, the birds flying in circles or sometimes swooping toward the boy, and as they move and whistle, the force of their motion fills this massive space, shaking the thin net in front of us, which moves slowly, lightly, the boy now smiling and soon he is laughing, a high-pitched silly giggle that if you close your eyes sounds almost like he’s crying and so I don’t close my eyes, just watch him as he circles, smiling, the birds rising from the basement or descending out of view, so that the boy now seems to fly among them all.

  Scavengers stop their work, the ones digging holes along the walls and the ten of them spread out through the scaffolding above, each adding to the framework that will eventually lift the nets and plants and birds even higher. But now they have stopped. All of them looking at the boy as he runs.

  All of them smiling. Some of them laughing. And I’ve never seen a scavenger laugh.

  They’ve worked on this for years, she said, but it’s obvious anyway that the people who built this have been at it for so long, tending this place, tending everything here that lives and grows.

  The woman is smiling, watching her boy next to the birds, her eyes wet, but she is laughing as he moves, in circles, the trees and the flowers beyond him and the birds ducking and dodging next to him, crying out, probably in warning or in fear, but here, now, it sounds to everyone like the birds are simply laughing along with the boy.

  CHAPTER 12

  The office manager tells me there are a few hundred teenagers at the checkpoint on the overpass.

  I ride my bike there from the newspaper’s office, moving quickly through the streets of downtown, then through the old neighborhoods before coming to the overpass.

  And it’s clear immediately that this is something different. These aren’t kids in lit-up cars. They aren’t kids coming here because of boredom or disdain.

  These kids are homeless. Castoffs. These kids are children.

  There are nearly two hundred of them, teenagers mostly, but some are younger, all carrying backpacks or small duffel bags. They are dressed in layers of clothes, items clearly accumulated over months or years of time. Hair long and thick and some of the boys have thin, bad beards across their faces, and some of the girls are tattooed across their necks and arms and the backs of their hands. Rough, colorless and elaborate tattoos done by themselves or a friend.

  “They shut down the shelters,” a girl says to the gardener as I listen. “Which is maybe a good thing. But now we had nowhere to go.”

  The gates to the overpass have been opened, but the kids are all gathered, pressed together, on the south side of the overpass. None have crossed into the North End.

  The minister puts his hand out and, in a moment, the girl shakes it. “Welcome,” he says, and smiles. “Welcome to the North End.”

  The kids begin to move slowly forward. The commissioner and others meet them as they cross, walking through the crowd, shaking hands, welcoming them, telling them where to find food and where there are places to stay. “There are homes,” I hear the commissioner say. “No one lives in them. And so you can live there. Those places can be yours.”

  The gardener steps up to a boy, sixteen or seventeen, who walks with a dog, more like a puppy, who stays at his side.

  “Your dog,” the gardener says, leaning down, scratching the short, tan hair on the dog’s thick neck. “Your dog does not run away.”

  The boy shakes his head. “Never once.”

  The dog circles the boy, then sits.

  “They say it’s not violent here,” says the boy. He’s looking at me, if only because the gardener is still leaning down, staring at the dog.

  “It’s not,” I say.

  “Can I believe you?” the boy asks.

  “How old are you?” I ask, aloud I think, but I’m not sure.

  “How old?” he repeats. He’s got brown hair and blue eyes and he stands almost six feet tall. “I’m sixteen,” he says. He pauses, looks around. In a moment, he asks quietly, “Is that okay?”

  I nod. I stare. I’ve done the math without meaning to, instinct. The boy is the age my oldest son would have been.

  I say, in a moment, “Yes. You can believe me.”

  • • •

  “I think there’s a way to fix the levees,” the gardener says.

  The gardener and I are in the library, standing over his table with the maps and the journals focused on the levees.

  “Or at least to keep any more from breaking,” he says. “And to keep the flooding from coming any farther.”

  I can’t think of a response.

  “So many levees have already brok
en,” he says, smiling slightly. “There really aren’t that many we need to fix.”

  “Who will do the work?” I ask him.

  He smiles again. “The scavengers.”

  What the levees need after years of inattention and years of more and more water pushing up against them is to be reinforced. The gardener shows me drawings, detailed schematics of how all the levees were built.

  “I could never build a levee,” he says, still smiling some. “But I can read a plan. And these plans all lay out the maintenance to be done. Beams that must be added or replaced every ten years.”

  The stubs of his fingers trace lines on the plan. He opens a file of public records he’s retrieved from the archive in the basement. There are only five small levees holding back the water.

  “We can find a way to insert new beams,” he says, turning to me and smiling some. “Can’t we?”

  The work begins within a week. The scavengers cut large steel beams from the insides of warehouses in the industrial zone. They find beams that aren’t corroded or rusted, then cut them to size with blowtorches. Fifteen feet each, they are stacked onto trucks that begin to haul them north toward the levees.

  “How long will this take?” I ask the gardener where we stand watching the scavengers lower a beam into slots built into the levees, slots that have been there since the levees were first built.

  The gardener turns to me. Says in a moment, “I think it will take forever.”

  There are teenagers, the kids who crossed the overpass, helping the scavengers. Ten of them at the warehouses helping to cut down the beams, another ten at a canal, helping with the unloading, with digging, with bringing beams to the scavengers.

  “Truly,” the gardener says now. “It will take years to reinforce the levees, and by the time the project’s done, it will be time to start over again.”

  I’m taking notes.

  “But that was always the point,” he says. “These levees, this city, it was never meant to fall dormant. It has always needed constant attention and care.”