by Dan Baum
BELINDA CARR
EGANIA STREET
1982
Life in the Lower Ninth Ward never got easier for Belinda Carr. As she grew into a teenager, she increasingly felt like the duckling whose egg had rolled into the wrong nest. Everybody around her was all about Lower Nine this and Lower Nine that, how the Lower Nine was the most wonderful place on earth. Didn’t they see what a dead end it was? Didn’t they see the pea-gravel streets and the rusted old cars? Was she the only person who wanted something better than dreary day work and a broken-down rented house? Belinda loved her mother and her brothers, Aunt Polly and Aunt Doll, cousins Faye and Greg and Stevie—but she yearned for conversation about something other than whose azaleas were coming in nicely and who’s having another baby. She didn’t even eat the same food as everybody else. Crawfish, oysters—all those spicy, creepy-crawling things everybody made such a fuss over—made her ill. She stuck to fried catfish, plain chicken, and other normal-people food. There were times when she grew so restless—and so lonely in her restlessness—that she could barely leave her room. She’d hole up in there for hours, feverishly consuming one romance novel after another, aloft in an immaculate dreamworld of fine-speaking people.
Lawless High School made her feel like a car racing with its engine stuck in low gear. What passed for honors classes slipped past effortlessly, with little to engage the hungry sprockets of her brain. The kids in her class were nice enough, but they were all about sports and dances and who-likes-whom. Walking home alone day after day, Belinda struggled to make herself want to join in, to be the kind of teenager she liked watching on Happy Days. She knew that she’d grown into an attractive young woman, with long legs and high, regal cheekbones. If she’d wanted to play the game, the game would have her in a heartbeat. That Lionus Jenkins, a distant cousin by marriage she’d known all her life, was suddenly the big man around Lawless—the star of both the football and the basketball teams. By being the only girl who didn’t swoon before him, she’d inadvertently caught his eye; even somebody as socially clueless as she could see that. But she put him off, like she put off all the boys, by failing to laugh at his silliness, by standing with her arms folded when she should be wiggling her butt, by looking down her nose when she should be gazing up. The whole boy-girl thing made her shudder.
I’m going to get out of here, she’d tell herself. I’m going to have the white-picket-fence life like on Family Ties. I’m going to live a normal life. The way out, she knew, was college, but nobody she’d ever known had taken that route; nobody in her world even understood what it meant. She was about to start applying, and she wasn’t going to tell a soul. Until it came time to go, up-and-out would be her secret.
FRANK MINYARD
MAINE
1982
Frank walked up from the dock, along the path between the dunes, wind ruffling his thick, graying hair, the sand warm on his feet. He breathed heavily from a long swim. At fifty-three, he needed firm routines to stay in shape.
The phone in the cottage was ringing. He sprinted onto the porch, pushed through the screen door, and picked up the receiver—a heavy black Bakelite artifact from the 1950s.
“Sorry to call, Dr. Minyard.” It was Gloria Boutté, from the coroner’s office. “You’re not going to believe what happened to Joe Maumus.”
Frank sank into a wicker rocker. He had to ask Gloria to repeat the story three times. Joe had been arrested at the Fairmont Hotel by Internal Affairs while naked, in bed with a woman, with a gram of cocaine in his wallet. He’d walked off his shift, leaving his police horse tethered to a garbage truck in an alley.
“Damn.” Frank laughed, despite himself. Joe was a good cop—that night at the plane crash still filled Frank with admiration—but he was something of a wild man. It’s why Frank loved him. He dialed Joe’s house, the old rotary clicking loudly. “It’s me,” he said. “What were you thinking?”
“It’s entrapment. They set the whole thing up, paid the woman …”
“Joe,” Frank said. “I believe you.” To come to the defense of a cop found naked in bed with a woman while on duty—with cocaine in his pocket, no less—would be politically risky. On the other hand, if a guy like Joe couldn’t make a little mistake in New Orleans, where could he? Joe was Joe, as good as a son to Frank. There was no cutting him adrift. It’s times like these Frank was glad he had the city wired. “I’m on my way,” he told Joe. “I’m going to save your ass.”
RONALD LEWIS
TUPELO STREET
1982
Ronald loved the view from his front porch. Tupelo Street was wide, with a fat, grassy neutral ground—less intimate but much grander than Deslonde. The homes were small and simple, with none of the fussy curlicues of the ones across the canal, but every one of them between Claiborne and St. Claude was owned by its occupant. Miss Catherine always had some candy in her apron pocket for little Renaldo and Rashad. Miss Crystal, Miss Hall, and Miss Beulah were usually out on their porches to greet Ronald when he came home from work. He couldn’t quite walk to Deslonde Street to set on his mama’s porch, the way his legs were acting up, but it was only fifteen blocks away.
It was a fine thing to own one’s home. Soon as the NOPSI guys had voted in the IBEW and he’d gotten his raise, Ronald and Minnie had bought this place for $26,500. They put down $1,500 and took a bank loan like anybody else.
Buying this house had shown Minnie’s dad. Still, the old man had tried to make Ronald feel small. When Ronald and Minnie had had no choice but to ask him to co-sign the loan to buy themselves a stove and fridge, he’d said, right in front of everybody, “You’d better be a man because if you don’t pay for this I’m going to take it.” Ronald still tensed when he remembered it. As though Ronald W. Lewis might fail to be a man!
No matter how important Ronald grew on the job—he was shop steward now—he could never quite gain the respect of Minnie’s side, the Hills. It burned him, made him feel less than whole. It reminded him he’d been born a bastard child who didn’t know his own blood parents. One day during a Hill gathering Ronald had come upon the old man lecturing little Renaldo and Rashad about how lucky they were to be Hills, and Ronald had ruined the whole party by taking the old man on. “These are Lewis children,” he’d said. “I am their daddy, Ronald W. Lewis. You are just their grandpa.” It made Minnie and her sisters furious, and it had made Ronald feel both big and small at the same time. It was good to take on old man Hill, but a man shouldn’t have to explain such things.
The screen door opened, and out walked Minnie’s cousin James Brown with a glass of iced tea in his hand. James, a quiet man who liked to twist his beard into a little braid, sat down next to Ronald without saying anything. There was no need, and it was one of the things Ronald loved most about life across the canal. If you didn’t have something to say, it was enough just to set together on the porch.
Ronald liked James; he had been married to the same woman since he was seventeen. James had a serenity about him that Ronald admired. He’d been born with a veil—the doctors at Charity had to snip a flap of skin off his face—and it had left him with the ability to see spirits. Minnie had told Ronald about how James, when they were little kids, would suddenly walk out onto the front porch and start talking to the air. The spirits didn’t frighten James, but they were a nuisance—popping up when least expected. He worked from time to time for the big funeral home across the canal, fixing dead bodies for burial. He said the only place the spirits didn’t visit him was when he was in the presence of the dead.
“Dead bodies,” Ronald once said to him, wrinkling his nose. “That’s not for me.”
“I like it,” James said. He turned and leveled his even gaze at Ronald. “They don’t move.”
PETE’S MONEY GREEN Cadillac swept around the corner of Urquhart Street and stopped in front of the house. The car was getting old, which did Ronald’s heart good. Pete was out of the game, finally had himself his own hair shop over on Caffin and Galvez. The long co
at and fedora were gone, but nobody ever looked as sharp as Pete, with his long, wavy oiled hair and, always, the finest shoes in the Lower Ninth Ward.
“Smile again!” Pete called from the sidewalk, lifting his big wraparound sunglasses. “Damn, Ronald, you lost your grille!”
“You know I joined the Masons, right?” Ronald said as Pete sat himself on the stoop. “Nutusken Lodge no. 5, Prince Hall order.”
“And what, you can’t have a grille to be a Mason?” Pete asked.
“Well, it’s like this: My Wishful Master, Big Joe Long—you know him, works by the phone company—he put his arm round me and said, ‘Brother Lewis, I likes you. But I’d like you better if you didn’t have all that gold in your mouth.’ I had a hunch he was right. So I went to the dentist and got unslugged. And I’ll tell you what. They treat me different down at NOPSI. Hero Evans himself said, ‘Ron, you look different.’”
“You gave up your grille to get a smile out of Hero Evans?” James asked.
Ronald smiled. “The grille was good. But I got my people to think about. If I can get a little more for them without the grille, then I’ll do without it. Of course, I couldn’t divest myself of all my history.” Ronald smiled wider and pointed to a single gold incisor. “I kept one.”
They fell into the usual Lower Nine conversation, a rundown of the welfare of everybody they knew. This one was out of work, that one was out of work. It was the containers, they all agreed. Containerized shipping was doing away with all the good jobs on the waterfront. Pete told them he was looking to buy his first house, but not in the neighborhood. He was looking out in New Orleans East, he said. “We should have given Miss Duckie our pennies.”
James mentioned a man they all knew who’d been shot and paralyzed in a drug deal right there on Galvez. “He’s stuck on stupid,” Pete said. The trick of being in the game, he said, is knowing when to get out. “Joseph Kennedy, the biggest bootlegger during Prohibition, became a captain of industry and totally legit,” Pete said. “When the game gets tough, you legitimize your hustle. I’m getting old. I want to sleep with both eyes closed.”
A killing on the streets of the Lower Nine was a bad omen. As the jobs disappeared, more men were spending their days sitting on their porches. They weren’t the role models they once were; without the paycheck, they didn’t swing authority in the families. Youngsters took advantage, brought their own way of doing things into the neighborhood, and now they were shooting each other up on Galvez.
A shadow was falling across the Lower Ninth Ward, no question about it.
PART II
WALKING ON GLASS
“With every contract you complete, you increase the level of protection. If a levee is two feet below its required level, it can protect against most hurricanes, but not the worst hurricanes.”
—ROBERT GUIZERIX,
Lake Pontchartrain project engineer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to the Times-Picayune, September 9, 1983
WILBERT RAWLINS JR.
COLTON JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL
1983
The band room, deep in the redbrick schoolhouse on St. Claude Avenue, was a windowless bunker. The walls needed paint, the floor was crusted with years of tracked mud and spilled Coke, and the stale air smelled of sweaty polyester. But it was fast becoming Wil’s favorite place on earth.
He sat on a folding chair in the second row, wrapped in the heavy brass arms of a sousaphone, rocking gently as he played, feeling weightlessly top-heavy. Around him, the other junior-high schoolers were blowing like crazy, girls leaning into their trumpets, boys frowning as they struggled for the right embouchure.
Wil was finally making music. After years of his listening to Da play for Miss Irma, the music he’d carried around inside him was making its way out through his fingers. He’d turned away offers to use his height on the basketball court, his bulk on the football field. He could see that while everybody at Colton went to games, they wandered around the stands during the ball-playing, talking and playing grab-ass. But they stopped moving and listened up close when the bands started playing. Band was the thing. Junior-high and high-school bands were the musical backdrop of the Mardi Gras parades. They were the heartbeat of the festivals. All the jazz musicians in New Orleans talked about the band teachers from their school days. Band meant something in New Orleans. It’s where the music was born.
“You’ve got to look at this score as a snake,” Mr. Jones said. “Every piece of music we pull out is different. You might have dealt with a cobra before, but this is an anaconda. You take your eyes off that snake, he’ll bite you.” He raised his arms and twitched them, and the band started in again on “When Doves Cry.”
Colton’s band was coming on strong. Last time they’d played against Gregory at the football halftime, they’d gotten beat, fair and square; Gregory was tighter, fuller, more intense. But last week against Lawless, the Colton band had come right off the chain.
Now Wil was troubled. Mr. Jones had the mellophones playing on the C and the baritones playing on the G. Everybody knew the G was right for the mellophone and the C was right for the baritone. Mr. Jones had them playing outside their register. He was sacrificing intensity. Wil’s hand shot up. “Mr. Jones!”
Mr. Jones reared back. Students did not speak unless spoken to. Wil stood. “Why don’t you give the G to the mellophones and the C to the baritones? They need to play in their …”
“Wilbert! This is my damned band!”
“But it would be more powerful. You got ’em playing outside their registers.”
Mr. Jones stomped over to the back wall and snatched up a framed diploma. He sidestepped his way into the sousaphones and shoved it under Wil’s face.
“You have one of these? No? Then you be quiet. Children are on a need-to-know basis. You don’t need to know why you’re playing. You just play.”
Wil stepped back. Even Da didn’t talk to him this way. Even Da explained himself. Mr. Jones had the mellophones and baritones crossways and was trying to bully Wilbert Rawlins Jr. into accepting it. Wil yanked the mouthpiece out of the sousaphone, untangled himself from its coil, and leaned over Mr. Jones. “You know what? I’m going to get that degree—I’m going to have a band that will blow your band out!” For emphasis, he raised his fist high over his head and slammed the mouthpiece onto the floor.
The room was silent.
Wil walked out the door, letting it slam behind him.
He was instantly sorry. He’d probably bent his mouthpiece, and Mr. Jones would put him out of band for sure. He crouched by the door, opened it a crack.
“I’ll tell you what,” Mr. Jones was saying. “Wilbert is right. Reversing the melophone and the baritone would be more powerful. But I don’t want all that power. Music has to start softly and grow. That’s how it lifts the soul.” Wil felt himself shrivel; he hadn’t thought of that.
JOHN GUIDOS
EILEEN’S HALLMARK, METAIRIE
1983
John leaned on the counter. On the shelf beside him, a regiment of foot-tall Christs, identically beseeching, provided a kind of silent, agonized cheering section to his failure. It was amazing, really, that he’d kept the stores going this long. The bank should have stopped him. They never should have lent him the money in the first place. Somebody should have said something.
The mailman came in and handed him a thick bundle of envelopes. John shuffled through them—mostly bills—and then in the middle a compact manila envelope the size of a paperback book, from Curtis Circulation in Hackensack, New Jersey. Bingo. “I’ll be in back,” he announced to his salesclerks idling by the window, and headed for his office at the back, a cluttered, windowless room, fluorescent lit and bleak: his refuge. He opened the envelope from Hackensack and pulled out the November edition of Penthouse Variations: “For Liberated Lovers.” He’d never been much of a reader, but he consumed Variations every month. It was a window on a hidden world where quirks like his were not only normal but celebrated. It had taught him a us
eful word: “fetish.” A fetish wasn’t something dirty or abnormal or wrong—it was creative and liberating. The magazine’s credo, printed on the back cover of every issue, summed it up: “Tapping the exciting heartbeat of contemporary American eroticism with provocative sexstyle exposés.” Variations made John feel like a member of a secret, worldwide confederation of sexual sophisticates. Anyone without a fetish was square, uptight, pitiable. The cover of this issue promised “My Phantom Leather Lover,” “Licking Secrets in Glossy Color,” and “Sex Games People Play.” At the bottom of page 126, though, was a little box so dry and mundane that it drew John’s eye. No racy photo or exclamation points, just a postbox and: “Like to dress? Write the Sorority.”
A NOTE ON the gleaming granite kitchen counter said Kathy and the kids would be home at nine. Plenty of time. John fixed himself a Southern Comfort and went out to the garage for his “tools.” Twenty minutes later he was in a familiar personal heaven, painted and dressed, alone with an intoxicating cylinder of beige plastic whose vibrations, placed just so, radiated through him in a way that dissolved the tension, loneliness, and shame that built up in his muscles day to day. The longer he pressed it to himself, the deeper he sank into a blessed refuge. He pushed it a little farther, and a little farther still. Delicious spasms overtook him, and for a moment he blacked out. Enough. His fingers felt for the vibrator, but it was gone. The sensations continued, stronger than ever—was it aftereffects? He groped around on the mattress, but the vibrator wasn’t there. The sensations still boiled up through his body.
He’d lost it inside.