by Tony Dunbar
“I see what you mean,” Gastro said thoughtfully. “Is that where you’re from, Port Sulphur?”
“That’s where I’m from. My daddy’s from Lake Charles, but we lived in Port Sulphur since I was ten. It ain’t much. Port Sulphur,” Steve concluded.
“I’ve never been there,” Gastro said. Since coming to New Orleans from Montgomery, Alabama, he had never been anywhere but the French Quarter.
Their conversation was putting Tubby back to sleep, but before he drifted away he caught a little of the voice on the radio. The reporter was saying there was widespread looting throughout New Orleans. The flooding had stopped, but the police were deserting. Some were even caught on camera stealing from stores. The mayor was demanding to know when federal troops would arrive. He said there were thousands of dead bodies floating around the city.
It was hard to sleep through that. Tubby found himself missing his good friend Raisin, who had stayed behind in Bolivia to finish off their business there. No telling when he would see Raisin again. The man spoke almost no Spanish but had a way of making himself understood in any language, and he had enough money to get through the month if he didn’t waste it all on women and high-priced booze. Man, a shot of good whiskey cost forty Bolivianos in the ex-pat bars. And beer was high, too, if you wanted it cold. It would be good to have Raisin around New Orleans right now. He could take care of himself, and then some. Tubby wished he could turn back the clock. He hoped all of his kids were safe.
13
Christine was still alive, but she was not sure for how much longer. Bonner had slapped her around until she quit fighting. He had threatened to throw her out the window. He had wrestled her to the floor. She thought he would break her arms. She had tried to hit him with a crystal paperweight, and he twisted her hair in his strong hands until her eyes almost popped out. Violating her sexually did not seem to be his goal.
When she finally gave up, he did too.
Rivette was quiet now. He squatted on the carpet by one of the picture windows. Past him Christine could see the stars. He had a pair of scissors and was fashioning what appeared to be a doily, or a string of paper dolls.
“I am Katrina,” he had whispered into her ear while he had her pinned face down on her father’s desk.
She inched her way across the carpet, hoping to get out of the room.
“You can’t leave,” he said simply.
She stopped, afraid to speak.
“People shouldn’t live like this. It’s not supposed to be this way.”
He went back to his scissors and paper.
“Uh,” she tried tentatively. “What do you mean?”
He set his project aside and faced her, crossing his arms over his knees.
“Boxes, cages, buildings, jails. It’s all wrong. It’s all got to come down.”
“Why does it have to come down?” she forced herself to ask. At her college orientation, where they lectured on the dangers in the big city, the social workers always advised, “Keep ’em talking.”
“The hurricane and me are just alike,” Rivette said thoughtfully. “We’re clearing the table. The way the hurricane blew things apart here and moved on was great,” he mused, “but part of me stayed.”
“Part of what stayed?”
“Part of the hurricane is part of me.” Bonner’s thoughts were a little confused, but he was putting the pieces together.
“You’re just a person,” Christine whispered. “No one is a hurricane.”
“Wrong,” he said.
She calculated the distance to the door.
Rivette seemed to sense this and became more alert.
“You probably wouldn’t understand,” he continued, “but we can get lots of power from the hurricane if we let it get inside us.”
“How would that be exactly? The hurricane is a part of nature, and you’re just a man.”
“I’m more than that. You could be more than that, too.”
A crazy thought hit Christine. This lunatic who had slammed her around wanted a soul-mate. Someone to share his world. She didn’t know what that world was, and she didn’t want a ticket to find out.
She tried a different approach. “Katrina is free as the wind,” Christine argued, “and you’re stuck in this little room.”
He didn’t like that.
“I’ve been stuck in lots worse places, and I always get out.”
After a minute he said, “You can come along if you want.”
“To do what?” she asked.
“To get stronger,” he said. “Like right now. I’ve been meditating and getting stronger and freer.”
“Maybe we’d get stronger quicker if we’d just call the rescue people and have them get us out of here.”
“I’m not stupid, you know, Christine.”
“You keep saying my name,” she said. “What’s yours?”
Bonner didn’t answer. He was deep in jumbled thought. His spiritual aim, gleaned from reading some crumbling religious pamphlets his uncle kept in a cigar box, was loss of human form. This was assisted by meditation, and also by eating fruit, but Rivette didn’t have any fruit. The hurricane had been so strong and free. Where could such a power have come from? He’d like to find out. And even in the spirit world, there was usually a male and a female. Perhaps that would explain why this female attracted him so.
She interrupted his reverie. “I don’t think you’re getting freer sitting here,” she said. “I think your spirit is in a cage.”
Christine was unaware of the destructive potential of Rivette’s spirit, but she nevertheless plowed ahead. She had been raised to be a good arguer.
“No one who does evil is free,” she told him.
She got off the floor and sat on the desk and adjusted her blouse. When she wiped her cheek she saw there was blood on her fingers. She rubbed it off on her jeans.
“What are you, some kind of a Sunday school teacher?”
“No, but there’s got to be something better you could be doing with your strength than beating up on women.”
“I didn’t hit you to hurt you,” he said, turning away. She calculated her chances of getting out the door, reaching the dark hallway, and hiding somewhere in the building. They weren’t very good.
“Really? Well, why did you then? You see I’m bleeding.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and he did regret it. “It wouldn’t have hurt if you knew about the periculum, the per-ga, the ro-wero.”
She thought he might be speaking in tongues like some TV evangelist.
“What do those words mean?” she inquired.
“It’s protection, it’s power, it’s Scythian,” he explained earnestly.
“That’s what you tap into?”
“That’s what I tap into.”
“Don’t you think there’s something more creative you could tap into? How about relating to other people in a normal way?”
Something was wrong with that statement. The criminal’s face went hard and she could almost watch him go back over to the dark side. He crossed the room and planted himself with his back to the door, the only way out. “You stay here,” he said and closed his eyes. In his mind he traveled somewhere else.
Christine became conscious that she was alive and that she had been sleeping. She was lying on the carpet. A few feet away Rivette sat in a chair, staring out the window at the sun coming up.
“What you said about ‘creative,’ what did you mean?” he asked.
She was slightly delirious, but she struggled to make her mind work. “Creative. Opening your eyes to the world. Bringing things to life.”
“There are different kinds of life,” he said. “Human life ain’t much.”
“Have you given it a chance?” Christine asked. Her body ached all over. Just stay alive, she thought. I am with a very disturbed person.
Rivette didn’t respond, but his pointy chin dropped to his chest. Just when she thought he might be drifting off he jerked upright and stared at her implori
ngly, like a dog begging for a bone.
“What’s your real name, anyway?” she asked, encouraging him.
“I told you.”
“Katrina? No, I mean your real name.”
He smiled. “Bonner,” he said. “Bonner Rivette.”
“Okay, Bonner. Don’t you care about your own life? Don’t you think you’d better fly out of here before you get caught?”
He nodded his head.
“Why don’t you call my father? He can help.”
“Right.” He looked into his cupped palms like he was reading a book.
“I’m serious. He’s a lawyer. He can pull strings.”
“You talk like I’m crazy.”
She forced a laugh. “You and me, we had a fight. We’re sort of like brothers and sisters now. What are we supposed to do? Jump off the building? I want to live, too. Let’s get out of here together. He won’t call the police or anything. Not if I ask him not to. He’s got a car. You could probably have it. He’d do that in a minute to rescue me.”
Bonner cocked his head and looked into her eyes. He was reflecting upon the proposition.
Flowers took Tubby up for a flight in the Airodream early on Thursday morning. According to the radio, the National Guard might arrive today, but they saw no signs of it. Other helicopters buzzed around—one was a big orange Coast Guard bird that Tubby recognized as the distraction beating its props the last couple of years over Mardi Gras parades. Another was from a TV station. There was a black one, flying straight over the city on a serious mission, with homeland security stenciled on its side. He and Flowers, in their small noisy craft, buzzed over the famous break in the Seventeenth Street Canal levee, which they had heard about on the radio but which neither of them had seen.
It was about a hundred yards long, right up close to the lake, on the New Orleans side of a canal that ran about three miles. Its purpose was to drain street run-off into Lake Pontchartrain from a wide swath of the metropolitan area. It separated New Orleans from the adjoining parish. Its point of origin was way back around the Metairie Cemetery, and it was fed all the way by big pumping stations on both sides of the city line. Hurricane Katrina had filled the lake like the world’s biggest hot tub, and its waters had sloshed around in the canal long enough to find an unexpectedly soft dike. The break was about fifty feet from the back doors of a whole block of upper middle-class urbanites. The water lifted their swimming pools and decks out of the ground, uprooted their trees, and swept their houses across several streets. Then it engulfed another hundred thousand homes.
Down below Flowers and Tubby they could see men with hard hats milling about on the fringes of the breach, studying the problem. Water from the lake was still washing through.
“Wonder why they can’t just drop a few eighteen-wheelers into that breach until they get it plugged?” Flowers asked.
“Must not be in the plan,” Tubby offered.
“I doubt they ever had a plan.”
“Criminal stupidity,” Tubby muttered.
Roofs and chimneys poked through the flood like lilies in an endless pond.
“Lord have mercy,” Flowers said. “Look how far that water has spread.”
They clattered over to the New Orleans side of the breach. As far as their eyes could take them, the lake had reclaimed the city for itself.
“It goes on for miles,” Tubby said, looking at the isolated rooftops of whole neighborhoods he was quite familiar with, Lakeview, Lake Vista, Gentilly, Mid-City, Carrollton, Old Metairie.
“You see those people down there?” Flowers asked.
“You mean the engineer types? Yeah, I saw them and I wonder why they’re not up here with us dropping railroad cars full of sand into that hole. How dumb do you have to be…”
“No, I mean those people on the roofs.”
Tubby looked down, and indeed there were clusters of people on several roofs, right below where he guessed Fleur de Lis Avenue might have been. “You want to rescue them?” he asked.
“I don’t see any place to put down,” Flowers cried, but he was already fluttering lower.
“Could I go down on a rope?”
“Yes and no. There’s a lanyard and a saddle behind you, but the winch may not be strong enough to pull you back up.”
“Let’s try it and see.” While the prop wash animated the tree tops below, Tubby scrounged around the tiny compartment behind his seat and organized the ropes. He tested the electric winch, and it buzzed to life.
“Seems to be okay,” he said. He strapped himself into the saddle. He opened the hatch door on the deck.
“You sure you want to try this?” Flowers asked doubtfully. “You ain’t no young stud.” One hundred feet under the skids, a woman in a chenille bathrobe waved at them frantically, trying to stand on steeply pitched shingles.
“Just get me as close as you can,” Tubby said. “I happen to be a former rugby player.” He had seen heroes do this on television before, and he felt heroic, having survived the Convention Center. It also seemed that the world had revolved many a time since he had last practiced law.
Flowers put the bird about forty feet above the woman, who was shouting at them. Some kind of creature was on the roof with her. It was a small dog, yapping and trying to keep its footing.
“Geronimo.” Tubby smiled and eased himself through the hatch. He climbed onto the strut while Flowers fought to keep the Airodream level. The winch gave him slack. He let his feet dangle, then slid his legs into space. For a minute he held onto the strut as if it were a trapeze bar, then let go. He swung in the wind, and the winch slowly lowered him down. When his feet hit the roof he stumbled and would have toppled into the water lapping the gutters if he hadn’t been tugged up short by the lanyard around his waist and shoulders.
The woman understood that they were trying to rescue her, but she didn’t know what to do. The dog was frantically skittering from one end of the roof to the other.
Teetering on the slope, Tubby unbuckled himself carefully, deafened by the rotor noise. The woman looked like his sweet old Aunt Nellie, if Aunt Nellie had been left out in the sun to cook for a couple of days. Her rosette face radiated hope when he approached with the contraption, and she feigned modesty when he fastened it around her legs and waist.
“What about Pookie?” she asked sweetly in his ear. “I can’t leave without Pookie.”
“Okay.” Tubby crawled on his knees along the crown of the roof. “Here, Pookie,” he sang. The dog was not cooperating. She retreated along the ridge tiles then feinted left and ran right to get around this strange intruder. She momentarily lost her footing and almost plopped into the water, but at the last second she clawed her way back to the top and scampered to her owner. The woman made the catch and gathered Pookie to her breast.
“Up you go,” Tubby said, and he made his thumbs up to Flowers.
The winch jerked the woman about two feet off the roof. She screamed and Pookie went flying. The dog landed on the pitched shingles and listlessly wobbled closer to her doom. The screaming woman was pulled higher and higher.
“Here, Pookie,” Tubby called desperately. Looking up he saw the woman’s bedroom slippers disappear into the helicopter. On his rump he slid toward the dog, but too late. It flopped into the gray-green chop.
The sudden bath seemed to energize the dog, however, and Pookie flailed at the drip edge until she found purchase. As if pursued by frenzied hounds she clawed her way straight up the roof and hopped into Tubby’s arms.
“You are one smelly critter,” he said happily.
The dog remained attached to Tubby while the rope and saddle came back down and as he clumsily used his other hand to get himself buckled in. When that mission was accomplished he signaled Flowers. The line went taut, lifting Tubby to his tip-toes, and then stopped.
Inside the helicopter, the woman wanted to know if that man had her little darling. Flowers was cursing at the winch.
“You’re too damn big.” Flowers shouted. “Yo
u weigh too much for this blamed…” He tried the winch again, and it groaned tiredly. Flowers looked down at Tubby looking up at him. “This should be fun,” he frowned. He pulled the handle and the Airodream ascended, swinging its human cargo forty feet below.
“Yaaah!” Tubby cried, watching chimneys and the tops of cypress trees pass below his feet. He clutched Pookie tightly for protection. “Yaaah!” They crossed the Seventeenth Street Canal, and the men in hard hats stared up at him shielding their eyes with their hands. He had a fine view of the lake and the wet churches and apartments on Metairie Road, when he dared to open his eyes. This wasn’t so bad.
He twirled slowly and thought it was sort of like the time he was in the revolving bar at the World Trade Center. He took in the landscape of missing roofs and toppled billboards. Behind him was New Orleans. Over there was the sublimely peaceful Lake Pontchartrain. The fine homes and golf courses of Old Metairie had flooded. Now that was interesting. Where was Flowers taking him?
To Lakeside Shopping Center, it turned out. Right by JCPenney’s. Right down to the big parking lot. Gently, Tubby’s feet touched the ground. Flowers brought it a little lower, and Tubby could get out of the harness. He had to sit on the pavement, keeping his grip on the dog. Once he was inert, the copter could move away to land. The woman took her time getting out, and shook herself like a bird ruffling its feathers. When she felt sufficiently composed she ran across the parking lot. Flowers hurried behind her, coming to check on his human yo-yo.
“Pookie,” the woman cried. She had to peel the dog out of Tubby’s arms, and when she had her furry love she showered it with kisses.
“Are you all right, boss?” Flowers asked, poking Tubby’s shoulder to get a reaction.
“I’m fine.” He couldn’t move yet. “Just a little windblown. Can you help me up?”
Flowers helped them all get straightened out. “I saw a police check-point at the other side of the shopping center when we came down,” he said. “I’ll run over there and see if they’ll take this woman somewhere.”