Nine Lives

by Dan Baum

  —AL NAOMI,

  senior project manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to the Times-Picayune, May 28, 2005

  WILBERT RAWLINS JR.

  GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER HIGH SCHOOL

  August 27, 2005

  Wil paced by the buses, looking at his watch. Students were boarding in crisp orange and green uniforms, their brass instruments flashing in the sunlight. Eight drum majors wore uniforms with big orange letters spelling out “G.W. CARVER” Nyja Sanders, now the section leader of the mellophones, had gotten her whole section on board, but a tuba was missing, and a baritone. They were about to play against St. Augustine High School, supposedly the best band in New Orleans. Wil couldn’t wait to get on the field; he was sure Carver could blow St. Aug out. But they had to be rolling for two o’clock.

  A familiar car swept into the parking lot, and Wil’s heart caught. Belinda rolled up beside him, and the window came down. “Hey.”

  “Hey.” Wil leaned down. Belinda had hardly ever come to Carver, and never on a weekend, even before they’d separated. She had Curtis in the passenger seat and a lot of stuff thrown in back. “Hey, Curtis.”

  “Hey, Mr. Wil,” Curtis said sadly.

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to play a game,” Belinda said.

  “Yeah! St. Aug!”

  “You ain’t listening to the radio?”

  “No.”

  “You ain’t heard about the storm?” Her voice was rising.

  “Yeah, I heard that.” Wil glanced at the sky, cloudless and still. He’d been listening to the order to evacuate, but surely it wasn’t time.

  “They’re telling us to get out the city, but you’re going to play your game.”

  “It’s the first game of the season! St. Aug!” He leaned his forearms on Belinda’s window. “We earn forty thousand dollars on this game.”

  Belinda flared her nostrils. “We’re going up to Hammond to stay by Niecy. You ought to get your mama and get out the city.”

  “Where’s Mookey?”

  “By her daddy in Texas.”

  “Belinda, we are so ready! I got them playing ‘Flight of the Bumblebee!’ You know how hard that is? I never heard no high-school band play that!”

  Belinda shook her head, and asked quietly, “How you been?”

  “I been okay. I miss you.”

  She wrinkled her nose as though he’d offered oysters. “Hmf. See you in a few days.” She drove off, Curtis looking out back at Wil.

  Someone called to him that Mr. Jackson needed to see him in the office—another delay. It was two o’clock, straight up.

  The game, Mr. Jackson told him, had been canceled.

  “Canceled?”

  “Storm coming. Send the children home so their parents can look after them.”

  “But they are on the buses.”

  “We’ll reschedule it.”

  The pieces were starting to fit together in Wil’s mind, and he asked, “Send them home to their parents?”

  “The city is evacuating,” Mr. Jackson said. “They need to go to their families.”

  “You know what kinds of parents some of these kids have.”

  “They’re taking people at the Superdome. We can only do what we can do.” Mr. Jackson gathered his suit jacket from a chair. “You got people you can go to?”

  “I got my dad’s people in Beaumont.”

  “Then I suggest you collect your mama and go there. Come on now.”

  The kids were horsing around on the bus, eager to get over to St. Aug and show what they could do. “The game’s canceled,” Wil told them. They groaned. They could see as well as he that the sky was clear and blue. “Listen to me,” Wil said. “Take your horns with you when you go. Keep practicing. Get home now. Get your parents, your brothers and your sisters, your grandmothers, and get out the city. Chances are I’ll see you all right back here in a few days.”

  “Mr. Rawlins?”

  “What?”

  “Where are we supposed to go?”

  “How we supposed to get there?”

  ANTHONY WELLS

  Roger and me lived above my cousin Jerry’s store on Reynes Street, corner of Warfield. It was a little bitty place—get your po’boy in there, your cigarettes. Sign painted on the wall outside said fresh seafood, turtle meat, crawfish, but he didn’t have none of that. That sign was there for years before Jerry had the store. He did take food stamps, though. And he had a pool table up in there; I liked the sound of them balls hitting each other. I could hear that up through the floor.

  Roger and me got upstairs on this big old metal staircase went up the outside. There weren’t but a couple two-story places in the Goose, so from the top of them stairs we could see the whole neighborhood. Greater Little Rock Baptist Church wasn’t no bigger than an ordinary house, but it had this big old aluminum steeple on it. One direction we could see the I-10 overpass and the bridge over the canal. Other way we could see all the way to St. Mary’s Academy. They had an all-girl marching band, and we could sit up there and listen to them doing “Bumpin’ on Sunset” by Wes Montgomery, Willie Bobo, Thelonious Monk, all that.

  Morning before the storm, I’m sitting up there and I’m seeing everybody loading up their cars and lighting out. My cousin Donald—that’s Jerry’s brother—I see him coming down Warfield in his pickup, got his whole family in there and all his shit piled up in the back. I’m like, where you going? And he’s like, Baton Rouge, man. Storm coming.

  Well, shit. We seen the storm on TV, but they’re always talking about storms coming. And Roger and me, where we going to go? My truck was good for the neighborhood, but it wouldn’t have made no Baton Rouge. We didn’t have no people outside New Orleans except a brother in California, and how we going to get there? Also, I’m seeing who’s not leaving for the storm, and I’m thinking, those motherfuckers going to have them a field day with everybody gone, you hear what I’m saying? I’m thinking we better off staying put. Kind of keep an eye out.

  Also, as Roger said, if it was as bad as all that, they’d be sending buses round for the people that don’t got cars.

  JOYCE MONTANA

  INTERSTATE 10 WESTBOUND

  August 27, 2005

  Joyce sat in the passenger seat of Denise’s car, breathing hot, wet air laced with gasoline fumes. “Let’s put the windows up, Denise, honey, and put on the air conditioner.” They’d been on the highway for four hours and weren’t even to Baton Rouge, which usually was a ninety-minute ride. Interstate 10 was solid cars. It would be days before they reached Houston.

  Denise hunched over the wheel. “We don’t want to risk overheating or running out of gas. Look.” Along the side of the highway, families stood beside dead cars.

  Joyce shuddered. “Try not to lurch the car,” she said. It was like being in a small boat on high seas.

  Denise’s whole upper body was slick with sweat. She wiped the back of a hand across her forehead. “I go when the traffic lets me.” The car rolled forward a few feet and stopped.

  Joyce never could abide cars; Tootie either. He’d never even learned to drive. The past summer, Denise had talked them into driving out of the city for Hurricane Ivan, and Tootie had been sick the whole way.

  “When the Lord took Tootie,” Joyce said, “He knew what He was doing.”

  BILLY GRACE

  NORTH CAROLINA

  August 28, 2005

  Billy stayed behind on the deck of the Freemans’ house when the rest of them went for a walk, and worked his cell phone.

  “You have any questions?” he asked Ivory. The house had forty or fifty windows, and every one of them needed storm shutters. Ivory had already pulled the shutters out the garage and was putting them up.

  “If it’s all right with you, I’m going to have my family come stay in the back house,” Ivory said.

  “That’s fine. Let me talk to Mrs. Montgomery.”

  Ivory went to find Big Anne, and Billy looked in through the glass door at the big-screen TV in
the living room. A white pinwheel, hurrying across the gulf in time-lapse satellite pictures, was headed straight for New Orleans.

  Big Anne came on. “No, we’re not leaving.”

  “Okay.” It was too late for that, anyway.

  “Alston’s being a perfect I-don’t-know-what.” Billy could picture it; Alston, Anne’s younger sister, could become quite the master sergeant in high-pressure situations, like readying a debutante party or Mardi Gras. He was glad she was at 2525.

  Alston took the phone from her mother.

  “Your friend Jonathan McCall wants to come ride out the storm here with us,” she boomed. “He’s bringing his mom.”

  That made sense. Jonathan and Jane lived on Arabella Street, his mom alone on St. Charles. Jonathan had a cool head, and the more people at 2525, the better. “I don’t think we’ll come back, then,” Billy said.

  “Oh, God, no. Stay put. It will blow through.”

  WILBERT RAWLINS JR.

  5972 DREUX AVENUE

  August 28, 2005

  Wil emptied his fridge—nothing but cans of iced tea. He was putting them in a Sav-A-Center shopping bag when the phone rang.

  “What you doing?” It was Reecie, a band mom, his latest girlfriend.

  “I’m heading out. Aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said lazily. “I’m waiting on my brother to come pick me up.”

  “Lawrence and I are taking Ma to Beaumont. You could come with us. We’ll stay by my cousins till it passes.”

  “I got my kids.”

  “I’m driving Ma’s car, and Lawrence is taking his. I been worried about the band kids, anyway. I’d feel good about taking you all.”

  “You not driving your sweet Lexus?”

  “Nah. Our driveway’s up off the street. It’ll be fine.”

  BELINDA RAWLINS

  INTERSTATE 10 EASTBOUND

  2005

  Belinda inched the car forward through the traffic, wondering if she’d made a mistake by leaving the city. Aunt Polly was too old to leave the nursing home where she was living, so Faye wouldn’t leave the city, either. Ditty and Skeeter had stayed with her, and cousin Stevie had stayed as well because he was a fireman and was needed. Belinda and Curtis could have stayed with them; she’d have been safe. Her plan was to get to Hammond, where Niecy was going to college, and ride out the storm there. But with all these cars, it might be days before she got there.

  Curtis whimpered with heat and boredom, driving her nuts. She looked over at him, where he was fussing with the seat belt. Without Wil, a light had gone out of his face. “We couldn’t stay and watch the storm,” she said gently, “because it might be dangerous. Remember how Grandma told you the whole Lower Ninth Ward flooded after Hurricane Betsy? This is a big storm.”

  “I’m hot.”

  Belinda had turned off the air conditioner and opened the windows. She was not going to get stranded like the families on the shoulder.

  The constant lifting of her foot from brake to gas pedal was hard on the knee; every time she moved her foot, a spark of pain shot up her leg. She steered around several policemen waving their arms: an accident. She thought of Wil and wondered if the road to Texas was as bad. Maybe she’d pushed the lesson she was teaching him too far. She wished he were with them.

  The road no longer looked familiar. Belinda had been staring at the back of the car in front of her for so long she’d forgotten to watch, but this wasn’t the way to Hammond. Her heart beat fast. That accident—those cops—was that the Hammond exit? The traffic eased. The needle on the speedometer crawled up to thirty miles an hour. A green mileage sign slipped past on the right: “Jackson, 17 miles.”

  She was in Mississippi.

  ANTHONY WELLS

  What happened was, the wind started up ’long about nightfall. Well, I been in wind before, shit. But this time, man, it got louder and louder till you didn’t think it could get no worse. But it did, man. Stronger. Screaming like a thousand whistles. And we’re up on the second floor, so the whole place is shaking. I kept thinking, okay, it’s played itself out, it’s going to stop now. But it didn’t. It went on and on and on. The lights was still on until, I don’t know, sometime late, a lightning bolt hit the transformer over by the canal and that motherfucker lit up the whole sky. BOOM! Blue fire—red, purple, and green fire. The lights blinked on and off, and then, bam, everything went dark. I look out, and there’s water up the windows downstairs. I’m thinking, we fucked up.

  About two o’clock, the neighbors start coming. Gwen and Jennifer and Steve and Nat and Guy, Geebee and Shortie—they all come, tied together so they wouldn’t blow off the steps. When I open the door, the wind takes it right off the hinges; I’m holding it by the knob and it’s like a big kite dancing around in my hand. We get that bitch nailed on and wind tears off the front roof. So now we got water coming in, the insulation hanging down. I took me a slug of liquor and curled up in the bathtub, thinking, that’s the safest place. I’m no pussy, but I got to tell you, man, this shit got right on top of my ass.

  FRANK MINYARD

  FAIR OAKS FARM

  August 28, 2005

  “Frank! Get away from the window!”

  “Look at that!” He clutched the windowsill. A three-hundred-foot length of fence tore free from the earth and went spinning into the blackness like a length of old typewriter ribbon. A steel trash barrel flew past, no more substantial than a balloon.

  “Frank!” Nancy tugged at his arm.

  One of the oaks that shaded the driveway listed and fell over with a crash. Another followed, smashing the split-rail fence. Frank’s big black bull and donkey walked calmly up the road together through the driving rain. He realized that they were evacuating, as he should have done. Now the roads were impassable.

  “Let’s get out of here!” Nancy shrieked.

  “Too late!”

  JOANN GUIDOS

  ST. CLAUDE AVENUE

  August 29, 2005

  The lights went out in Kajun’s, and JoAnn felt her way to the side door. She pushed out into the needles of rain, leaned over the generator, felt for the rope, and pulled. She could barely hear its roar over the wind, but it vibrated violently and the lights flickered on. That would put looters on notice.

  “Good work,” said Barbara from behind the bar when JoAnn fought her way back inside and pulled the door shut. “But maybe we should be thinking about getting out of here.” Barbara was already drunk, and pale with terror.

  JoAnn moved behind the bar and poured them each a finger of Southern Comfort. “My people got nowhere to go,” JoAnn said. “I’m not leavin’ ’em.”

  As though on cue, the front door banged and Mitch struggled in, streaming water, his eyes sunken, hollowed out. “If I’m going to die,” he announced, “I’d rather die here.” Mitch had barely gotten settled into his usual bar stool when Kenny and Renée stomped in, whooping and hollering with the exhilaration of having risked their lives for the pleasure of drinking at Kajun’s. Then came Phoebe—breathless, already drunk, shrugging off a sodden woolen greatcoat. “I couldn’t take being in my house alone,” she said, her voice shaking. Mitch put his arm around her shoulders. Andy, the gray-haired neighborhood philosopher, banged through the door, delicately flicked water from his sleeves, and called to Barbara for a Cutty and water.

  By midnight, a couple dozen regulars filled the bar stools and hard wooden chairs at the tables. The wind, screaming over the jukebox, sounded like a jetliner revving up on the St. Claude neutral ground, but the bar, made of cinder block, felt cozy and safe. A short-haired woman JoAnn didn’t know made for the door, so drunk she could barely walk, shouting something about needing to “find Michael.” JoAnn had to pull her back physically. After the woman made two more attempts, JoAnn dug out a roll of duct tape and lashed her to one of the ceiling supports. She finally fell asleep there, slumped forward like a soldier shot by firing squad.

  TIM BRUNEAU

  HAMPTON INN

  Au
gust 29, 2005

  “Vodka and Gatorade!” Tim yelled above the wind, raising his glass. “You can hydrate and dehydrate at the same time!” He and Jeff stood on a small balcony, sheltered from the worst of the wind, smoking cigarettes and playing a game with the butts. They’d flick them toward the end of the wall, where the wind would catch them and shoot them off like bullets. Better than hanging around inside, where cops were staggering drunkenly around the hallways, from one party to another, leaving plates of red beans and jambalaya on beds and dressers, beer bottles rolling around underfoot.

  Across the street, some awnings tore off the Convention Center and rose into the night sky like dried leaves. Tim heard a heavy splashing sound and ducked instinctively, thinking the Gulf of Mexico was about to come down on top of them. But it was only a trio of drunken patrolmen, jumping naked into the pool, just to be able to say they’d done it.

  RONALD LEWIS

  PELHAM HOTEL, MAGAZINE STREET

  August 28, 2005

  “I don’t like this!” Minnie clutched at Ronald’s shirt like she was ready to hoist herself into his lap. The room shook.

  “We’ll be all right.” Ronald squeezed his arms around her. “We’re better off than in our house!” In truth, he wasn’t sure. He’d brought Minnie up here to the high ground alongside the river because he thought the Lower Nine might flood like it did during Betsy. But the Pelham didn’t feel anywhere near as solid as his house on Tupelo Street. It might not flood, but it might bust apart. The wind hit it like a gigantic hair dryer at close range. As Ronald and Minnie huddled on the bed, the room banged as though a car had struck the building. Two walls split apart and the ceiling above lifted free, leaving a three-foot hole to the outside. A blast of hot wind and rain exploded in on them.