The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

  Terry began laughing into his shirt as Sam hyperventilated trying to cross a bridge over the Mississippi. ‘This place has had it,’ Sam said. ‘It’s a muthafuckin’ cluster-fuck, man. Nobody knows what’s going on.’ After he’d made it onto a drivable part of the freeway – yellow school buses abandoned all the way down the route – he started shouting out the window at the military vehicles passing on their way into New Orleans. ‘Go home, you fuckin’ losers! You dumb Yankee fucks. Why don’t you go back and do somethin’ useful, like play paintball, you bitches!’

  ‘They’re crazy about looters,’ said Terry. ‘The troops shot one of them last night and they put a sign on him that said: “A thief died here.”’

  ‘He wasn’t white,’ said Sam. ‘I haven’t seen a single white person looting.’

  ‘You haven’t seen anyone looting,’ said Terry.

  ‘But it’s blacks, Terry. About two hundred of them.’

  ‘I done seen none,’ said Terry.

  As the truck disappeared over the broken freeway and New Orleans receded in its soup of chemicals, Mayor Ray Negin came on the radio. His only song was about the failure of Washington. He had no plans of his own, nothing to propose. Blaming Washington was the only thing that mattered. There was an almost delighted tone to his self-exculpating voice. ‘Mosquitoes that are biting dead people are starting to fly,’ he announced.

  Sam combed his hair in the whiteness of his rear-view mirror. ‘We’re needed in Mississippi,’ he said. ‘Gulfport, Biloxi. Those folks need what we’ve got. I just wanna help some people.’

  Terry Harper had reckoned that a good way to get away from the trouble of school was to join the air force. He forged the date on his birth certificate and gained entry that way, leaving North Carolina on 31 October 1973. He was sent to Montana, where, he says, there was a lot of racism on the base. ‘The base commander threatened to have me shipped to Iceland,’ he said, ‘because I was fucking his daughter. I mean, there were only four black girls on the base and 140 black men and those girls charged for pussy.’ He got out of the air force after ten months and went to college to study mental health technology. ‘That was a fun time,’ he said. ‘Pussy for days, a different bitch every day if I wanted one. Me and this white guy, we had an apartment at the country club and we took women there.’ But he was married by then and his wife couldn’t stand his philandering so she asked him to leave. ‘She threw all the furniture I’d bought out in the street, man,’ he said. ‘It was all just lying there in the snow.’

  Terry went to live in a mobile home. ‘It was a good thing Aids wasn’t poppin’ back then,’ he says. ‘Because I’d be some dead muthafucker. This stinky-assed bitch (she’s a preacher now): she lied and said I was fucking her and her husband came around with a.55 shotgun in his hand and told me he’d shoot me if I fucked around with his wife any more. I took the bitch out into a field the next day and said, “Bitch, you tried to get me killed today,” and I put a gun to her face and she was scared, man.’

  Eventually, he went to graduate school in Atlanta. He got a Woodrow Wilson fellowship for $39,000 but dropped out because, he says, in a class of sixty-six people he was the only black. ‘I had no voice,’ he says. ‘I just felt I was in the wrong place. This was America and I had a God-given right to be heard but if you spit on me goddammit, I go directly to your ass. Things have stayed the same in a lot of ways. A whole lot of white muthafuckers, they think they can talk to you any old way they like.’ He ended up working with deprived kids. ‘Hard-assed kids,’ he said. ‘But you can make a difference to kids like that. One of them I worked with is now a district manager for Taco Bell. He runs three Taco Bells. He’s one of the most respected people I know.’

  Terry has had problems with drugs and women. That’s what he says. He lost a good job as a drugs and alcohol counsellor because of cocaine (he was using on the job), then he lost his career as a photographer for the same reason. ‘My mother was killed by alcohol,’ he said. ‘From an early age I felt I had to compete with my brother. He always got everything. My sister, too. Back in the day, complexion was everything and she was whiter than me. Until recently, you couldn’t get anywhere near elected office unless you were light-skinned and that’s what I grew up with.’

  Terry paused often when talking about his life. He wants to get things right. He wants to be honest. ‘I wanna get out of the Waffle House by next February,’ he said. ‘Back to Atlanta. Back to photography. I’m good at that.’ When he said this he hesitated and stared into the near future, then he smiled, as if there was something more essential about himself that he had not brought out. ‘I once fucked fifty-eight women in one year,’ he said. ‘I had a contest with some guy – who could fuck the most women. And man, I even fucked his regular girlfriend. It isn’t that hard if you know how to go about it. We used to strip for wedding showers. It was a good thing, you know. Two hundred dollars a pop, plus tips.’

  We couldn’t find a motel in Mississippi, so Sam parked the car in Hammond and we spent the night in the truck. A neon sign – ‘All You Can Eat Catfish’ – rasped through the early hours, and Sam occasionally woke up and bathed his face in the blue light of his laptop, typing furiously, attempting to figure out how best to reach the poor Americans who needed him. Terry propped his bad leg up on the dashboard. ‘Goddammit,’ he said at first light, ‘I might have to get me to an emergency room.’

  ‘Looks like we won’t be taking a bath today,’ Sam said, pouring talcum powder down the front of his shorts. ‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘Feels like gittin’ a whole new pair of drawers on, man.’

  A woman walked by with her dog on a lead. ‘She’s got some ass, man,’ Sam said. ‘Look it, Terry. She’s your colour.’

  ‘Hot damn!’ said Terry. ‘She’s got one of them be-donk-edonk asses. It goes all the way down, baby. She’s fine.’

  ‘Go on, dawg! She make yo jump up and slap yo mama.’

  Sam and Terry decided they might need more equipment to help the people of the Mississippi Delta, so they joined the dawn chorus at the nearest Wal-Mart, touring the near empty aisles in a couple of electric-powered buggies, the ones intended for the old and the infirm. It was the calmest they had been for days: the store Muzak dimming all anxiety as they threaded through the lanes. They chucked insults across the gaps and eventually Terry pulled up at one of the checkouts with a basketful of cheap toys. ‘A dollar each, right?’ he said. The girl looked at him strangely, but Terry was sure there would be children in Mississippi who had lost all their toys.

  Beside the front doors, an overweight pensioner was talking to her neighbour. ‘What if the Great Man Upstairs says: “You haven’t learned your lesson yet, you need some more?”’ she said.

  ‘God praise the volunteers,’ said the neighbour. ‘That’s all I can say. The volunteers are the salt of the earth.’

  On the Mississippi coast, the morning seems to arrive not out of the sky but out of the trees, a golden show coming slowly until the day is bright and firmly begun. ‘We’re gonna do good today,’ Sam said.

  ‘We already did good,’ said Terry. ‘We’s offering. That’s all we can do and if the people wants help they’ll get it.’

  ‘Today,’ said Sam. ‘I’m serious as a heart attack.’

  As the truck entered Gulfport, a holiday town that had taken the full force of the hurricane the Sunday before, some of Sam’s general edginess was beginning to influence Terry’s view of the situation. ‘I wish some of them TV news stations would interview me,’ he said. ‘CBS, NBC, CNN, all those muthafuckers. I’d tell them like it is. They’re saying: “This is needed, that is needed.” Everything is here, man, they’ve just got to use it right. These utility people, man. They’re tellin’ like they’re working round the clock. That’s complete bullshit, straight out lies. They’re not leaving their motels until ten in the morning.’

  ‘They oughta be organised just like the military,’ Sam said.

  ‘You don’t know jack shit,’ said Terry.

&
nbsp; ‘Don’t tell me what I don’t know. I work with television. I know about cable. Them boys care about people. You just got a goddamn chip on your muthafuckin’ shoulder, Terry.’ The boys argued often, but they would always retreat from any serious confrontation by hooking onto some shared joke, usually about a passing woman. ‘I could grunge-fuck that bitch,’ Sam said of a woman walking past a convenience store in Gulfport. ‘She’s just the way I like ’em.’ On the other side of the road, a sixteen-wheeler truck full of hearses was being unloaded, hearse by hearse, in the forecourt of a gas station that had no gas.

  Gulfport was struck by winds of 160 mph. The morning had started out very blue and very calm, but dark clouds broiled in the sky and Hurricane Katrina ripped over the Gulf and slammed through all the towns and villages on the Mississippi coast. The casinos that stood at the ocean front in Gulfport were gutted and several of them had ended up on top of the freeway. The devastation was still spectacularly obvious: lorries piled on top of one another; hotels pulped, with glass and mud and trees and bathroom products scattered over a massive area. Concrete had been blown apart. Metal was twisted. And for five or more streets back from the ocean, people’s houses were splintered.

  By the time we reached Gulfport, the military were very much in evidence, though nobody knew what to do with them. A lot of saluting took place, a lot of standing before maps of the devastated areas. As in all military zones, a great deal of attention was taken up with the troops themselves – transporting them, feeding them, briefing them, guarding them. Only sporadically were they put to work. Some people concluded that they were there to provide a show of force, a warning to looters, and evidence that the federal government now cared. Yet the real stuff of the Mississippi relief effort was being run by agencies and volunteers. It might be said that the salient characteristic of the modern American military is that they always appear homesick, they always seem alienated, and they always look bored. This may be true of any military force in any part of the world, but it was certainly true of the American soldiers who came to serve in the American South.

  The Volunteer Command Post was in a school just outside the town and much of the military was stationed there. As Sam drove up he was flagged down by four young men in uniform. Three of them appeared to be seventeen years old, and the one who stepped forward to speak, the one with authority, was no more than nineteen. Sam rolled down the window.

  ‘Morning, zug-zug,’ said the officer.

  ‘Hi,’ said Sam.

  ‘Have you any weapons, zug-zug?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘In the truck, sir. Do you have any weapons in the truck? Zug-zug.’

  Sam looked at Terry and shrugged. ‘A hand gun,’ he said.

  ‘I have to check that, zug-zug,’ said the officer.

  He walked off to speak to a superior and Sam turned with his mouth open. ‘What in fuck’s name is he saying? What’s this “zug-zug”?’

  ‘Fucked if I know,’ said Terry.

  The young officer came back shaking his close-shaved head. ‘I’m afraid we can’t allow any guns on the facility. Zug-zug.’ The men behind the officer were smiling now.

  ‘What is this “zug-zug” shit?’ asked Sam. The officer broke into a broad smile and his men cracked up behind him.

  ‘It’s just a joke we’ve got going, sir,’ he said. ‘Things are a bit slow out here, so he just dared me to say “zug-zug” after everything I said.’

  ‘Oh, cool,’ said Sam. ‘I got ya. What I’ll do is, I’ll go and bury this gun and then come back. Is that all right with you?’

  ‘Do what you have to do, sir.’ Sam drove along the road and buried the gun as he said he would, right in an old pile of dirt next to an abandoned house. When he drove back the soldiers searched the car and then waved us through.

  *

  Nothing fazed Adam, the co-ordinator, nothing excited him, nothing moved him: he was a disaster professional, a young man hardened by too much experience, practical to the point of insolence. ‘The thing about this situation,’ he said. ‘Many people downtown who look like they need help, who’ve suffered a lot of devastation, they can afford to pay for having trees cleared and cars towed. You don’t have to do it for them. It’s the poor and vulnerable ones you have to look out for. If I drive down there and I see generators outside people’s houses I just drive on. That’s the way it is. There are folks who need help who would be happy to see you guys. Be choosy about who you help.’

  Sam had nodded through this speech, but he did not take any of its detail to heart. He had come from North Carolina because he had watched television and felt Hurricane Katrina presented a challenge to ordinary people as well as an opportunity for self-definition. He didn’t mind who he helped. New Orleans had been too murky and unreal, too spooky, too inaccessible, but, here in Mississippi, Sam was going to do his bit for America. On the back roads of Gulfport he drove the truck and kept his eyes open. Power lines had collapsed and every house had something shattered or crippled about it. In one of the nicer drives, Sam spotted an old white man and his wife trying to lift a generator down from the back of a pickup truck. He hit the brakes and swerved into their drive.

  Eli Myrick has lived and worked in Mississippi all his life. That day, it being hot, he was wearing light-coloured shorts, a polo shirt and a straw hat, with white towelling socks climbing up his weak legs in a style both senior and fresh. Sam and Terry got to work lifting down the Myricks’ new generator. Their house had lost power and one of the walls had caved in with the force of the hurricane. They were well off, though, and had a second house out of the state, so this was all just a pest. Sam was kneeling on their patio dealing with the transfer of gas from the old generator and Mr Myrick leaned against the kitchen door, pleased but also not pleased, the eclipse of his competence almost too evident in the words of his wife. ‘Oh let them do it, Eli. You’ll only hurt your back. Oh, honey, let them go ahead. Step back. That’s right. They know what they’re doing. This young man’s an engineer, Eli.’

  Mrs Myrick brought pink lemonade and Spam sandwiches for the boys and told them about her years as a history teacher. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I was just saying to my friends the other day: with all this terrible business happening to us here in the South, it proves that the Civil War will never be over. God save us from the North.’

  Terry was leaning against the truck when Sam came out. ‘That sandwich she gave us sure was salty,’ he said.

  Sam drove on and parked the truck on the ocean front, where Chiquita Bananas lorries lay about like crumpled toys. People who ignored warnings and remained on this stretch died instantly when the hurricane hit the shore. Terry walked into the shell of an old employment centre: there was nothing left, not a paper-clip or an office chair; a spout of toxic water bubbled up from a hole in the concrete floor. In the car park outside, where huge trees lay snapped in two, a tennis ball was pushed softly by the remaining wind. Terry saw a wheelchair abandoned in the middle of the highway: earlier, he had wondered why so much of this destruction was somehow familiar, and he realised he had seen it before, like every other person in America, in War of the Worlds.

  The streets behind the ocean were no-go areas. The army were discouraging people from entering. But Sam and Terry drove round, looking for people to save or simply to help in their struggle with the collapsing buildings. Where the houses had doors, many of them were marked with orange paint and a number, which indicated how many had died there. The sight of the devastation had a different effect on the two men: it made Sam more practical, calling out to people he saw to ask if they needed help with the rubble, had enough cold water, or were OK inside. But with Terry the dreadful sights of Mississippi brought him further into contact with his militant past. He saw the effects of inequality in the mud around him. At one point, someone said something about Jesus and Terry just shifted his bloodshot eyes. ‘Let me tell you about this country,’ he said. ‘The Catholic Church is filled with the worst racists of them all. Some prie
st, he sucked two hundred little dicks and you know what happened to him? He got a raise, man. They made him goddamn archbishop. And any black priests who commit adultery get kicked out the diocese. That’s it.’

  ‘Well,’ said Sam, surveying the ruins from the wheel. ‘I ain’t helping no black people. I just wanna see how bad they live.’ Then he sang a few bars of ‘God Bless America’. He saw a woman on a porch. ‘Man,’ he said into his dead walkie-talkie. ‘You’re so ugly you’d have to wear a pork chop around yo neck to get the dogs to play with you.’ Terry sniggered into life.

  ‘You’re so ugly you would scare a glass of water,’ he said.

  The Red Cross had warned Sam and Terry that it was dangerous to drive in those areas without a military escort. One of the Humvees had been shot at earlier that day. But the military men up at the command centre didn’t want to escort the boys: they didn’t think it was their job. It appeared that no one had bothered to establish a chain of command between the Red Cross and the military, so the people, such as Sam and Terry, who were delivering aid were expected to take their own risks and only help people they felt they could trust.

  That night, the dark in Gulfport seemed darker than the dark of anywhere else. Electricity was still only minimally available and the stars looked down with keen eyes. Terry’s gouty ankle had grown to the size of a small planet, and he slept out in the open air at the back of the truck, stretched out on a long toolbox, his leg hoisted higher than the rest of him and pointing at the stars. Sam fell asleep in the driver’s seat with the broken walkie-talkie tight in his hand.

  When he was a child, Sam was committed several times to Cherry Hospital, a place for children with problems. ‘I’ve always wanted my friends to come with me,’ he said. ‘But they never have. They never will. I don’t really have any friends, to tell the truth.’