by Dan Baum
Minnie screamed, struggling to get up. Ronald pinned her to the bed, eyes squeezed shut, praying.
They lay like that for four hours.
BELINDA RAWLINS
BATON ROUGE
2005
Belinda couldn’t carry Curtis. He was too big, and she was too tired. “Hey,” she said, nudging him. “I got us a room.”
She’d driven all the way up to Jackson, turned around, and driven all the way down to Baton Rouge. A foolish move: the city was overflowing with people from New Orleans. Three o’clock in the morning, and the streets were choked with cars packed with frightened and angry New Orleanians. It was a miracle she’d been able to find a motel room.
She kicked off her shoes and looked at her reflection in the dark TV screen. You finally fell in love with a good man, got a perfect house, a father for Curtis, and you left him. She stood to undress, her knee throbbing.
ANTHONY WELLS
The wind finally stop and we look outside, and I never seen so many stars. Sky was clear like I never seen it in New Orleans before, and there was no lights anywhere. It was looking at the face of God, man. Long about six o’clock in the morning, water was down to about our waists. So we walk out to the Arab’s store on Chef Highway. The man is there, and he opens up the store. Says, “Don’t worry, we got insurance.” Water was going to corrode everything anyway. We took water, food, disinfectant, bleach, washing powder, and took it back upstairs.
At first the water came and left out, so Chef Highway was pretty much dry. People were taking U-Haul trucks, putting their kids in them, and lighting out. But we figured, shit, storm’s over. Why go now? One dude took a U-Haul truck down to Winn-Dixie, which the people had opened up, and brought back everything we needed. Meat. A grill. A radio with batteries. We was in good shape. We’re thinking why should we leave? We had everything we needed.
Then the water come back up.
RONALD LEWIS
CRESCENT CITY CONNECTION BRIDGE
August 29, 2005
Ronald and Minnie stepped gingerly out of the Pelham Hotel into an eerie dawn silence. A traffic signal lay on the sidewalk, a streetlight lamp tilted crazily into an office building, oak limbs lay across the street like barricades. Minnie gasped and clutched Ronald’s arm. The parking garage next to the hotel had collapsed in a heap. “We lucky to be alive,” Ronald said.
Minnie wanted something to drink, and Ronald let her walk up the block in search of a store. The struggle-buggy was unscathed; he drove it around front. A scream made him turn, and here came Minnie, heels clacking loudly on the cement, beside herself. “There’s water coming up in the street! There’s water coming this way!”
He got her into the car and sat hugging her. “There’s always water in the street after a storm. Let me get you home. We’re fine, Minnie. We’re fine.”
He started the car and reached for the radio. Nothing. He twisted the dial, but there was nothing to hear—just a distant, hollow roar, like the ocean. He kept twisting the dial, until a faint voice broke through. “This is United Radio Broadcasters of New Orleans.” He fiddled at the dial, but there was no other signal. He went back to United Radio Broadcasters of New Orleans, whatever that was. The announcer was taking a call from a woman sobbing so hard they could barely make out her words. “I’m in the attic with my babies and we got nothing to eat and no water and the water’s still coming up!”
“Where are you?” the announcer asked shakily.
The woman shouted an address on Derbigny Street. “Corner of Egania!”
That was a few blocks from the family home on Deslonde.
“Send somebody!” the woman shrieked. “Send somebody with a boat!”
Minnie was shivering. Ronald switched off the radio. Boats in the streets of the Lower Nine. It was happening again. He turned to face Minnie and held her shoulders.
“Listen to me. I can’t take you home right now. We’re going to Thibodaux.”
As the struggle-buggy strained to crest the Crescent City Connection bridge, Ronald thought, them cane fields keep calling us back.
TIM BRUNEAU
JACKSON AVENUE
August 29, 2005
Restless bursts of wind ruffled the trees overhead, and a light drizzle dampened Tim’s hair. He filled his lungs. The tang of a thousand busted-open oak trees made the air taste scrubbed. It crackled with ozone and buzzed through his veins like giddy joy. New Orleans had never smelled so good. He looked at the woman lying prone on the pavement. The sweetness wouldn’t last long, at least not on this block. He raised his radio to his lips. “Unit one six six four, again. Any word on the coroner?”
“Still no answer. You want me to try EMS?”
“Sure.” Tim looked at his watch. He’d been waiting ninety minutes. An ambulance, at least, would get her off the street and onto some ice. How dumb did you have to be to go out in the middle of a hurricane in your little capri pants to buy crack? Whom did you expect to find, with the wind howling at 110 miles an hour? He studied the driver’s license he’d retrieved from the beaded purse.
Way to go, Marie.
The back of her head was flattened, and blood stained the collar of her white button-down shirt. Next to her head lay an enormous, teardrop-shaped streetlight, the bulb smashed. A naked pole rose from the sidewalk. Twenty-four years old, killed by a falling streetlight while prowling for crack, for Christ’s sake.
The sunburned patrolman who’d found her walked up, perspiring in a bright yellow raincoat. “What’s up?”
“Talked to the family,” Tim said.
“You get the OLJ?” The Oh Lordy Jesus.
“No. They were kind of blank. Matter-of-fact. You know, the death-is-a-part-of-life thing.”
“This neighborhood anyway.” The patrolman rubbed at his peeling nose. “Look at that place.” The wooden house beside them had burned so long ago that the roof was a tangle of vines as thick as a pumpkin patch. What other city would let a derelict like that stand for so long?
The day grew hotter. Tim’s head buzzed with sleeplessness. A young woman tottered up on eight-inch heels.
“When’s the number 12 start up?” she asked, without a glance at the body.
“The bus?”
“Up Carondelet. The number 12.”
“Might be a couple days before they get the branches out, the power up,” the sunburned patrolman said.
“Thank you, officers.” She tottered off.
“One six six four,” Tim’s radio squawked. He turned it up. “Shooting at Coleman’s Sporting Goods on Earhart.”
“On my way,” Tim said. He looked up the block. People stood in doorways, sullen, watching the drama of the dead woman. He turned to the sunburned patrolman. “Mind sticking around? Keep them off her.”
“Television’s out,” the patrolman said. “This is the morning’s entertainment.”
Coleman’s Sporting Goods bristled with patrol cars, parked at all angles. Tim left his unmarked Crown Victoria at the curb and loped, bent kneed, to the yellow tape, where he showed his badge to the cop and was waved inside.
Frank, a melancholy shooting-squad detective, was counting shell casings. They were strewn like spilled popcorn across the linoleum floor. Beyond him, paramedics worked on three guys whose blood ran in bright rivers down the aisles.
“Looks like two groups of looters surprised each other and started shooting,” Frank said, in a meaty Kenner accent. “Nine-millimeters and AKs.”
“What were they after?”
“School uniforms.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Catholic school uniforms are a big thing.”
Tim walked over to a young black man who was grimacing from a wound in his thigh. “Don’t die, you scumbag,” he said. “I don’t want to handle your case.”
Frank shouldered him aside. “Go ahead and die,” he said. “I don’t want your case, either.” He and Tim gave each other a high five.
Captain Cannatella walked up. “Whatc
ha got?”
“They’re all gonna survive,” Frank said. It would be his case after all.
“Captain,” Tim said. “I’m waiting two hours on Jackson Avenue for the coroner. What’s going on?”
Cannatella stopped. “I’m hearing all kinds of crazy stuff. But all I can tell you, we’ve got water pouring up through the storm drains near the station house. I’ve never seen that before.”
“I’m about ready to put her in my unit and take her to Charity myself.”
Cannatella snorted.
“I’m serious.” A body lying on the street for hours—it was disorderly.
Cannatella frowned. “Listen, I wouldn’t order you to do that. But it’s your scene. You do what you gotta do.” This is why Tim loved Cannatella; he let his people use their own judgment, then stood behind them.
The heat was rising in ripples off Jackson Avenue by the time Tim got back. The dead woman was starting to smell. The sunburned patrolman squatted in the shade of the burned house. An old waterbed mattress lay near him in the weeds. “Help me roll her up in that,” Tim said.
The patrolman wrinkled his peeling nose. “That’s the coroner’s job.”
Tim shrugged. “We can’t stay here all day. We can’t leave her.”
They spread the waterbed beside the woman’s body and lifted her onto it. She was small; it was easy. They rolled her into the blue plastic, like kids pushing a snowball. It was harder to wrestle her into the backseat of the Crown Vic.
Tim looked up. On the stoops, several women had their hands on their mouths. Outside the burglar-gated door of a nasty-looking club called the Dreamers, a big man stood with his hands on his hips. The people of Jackson Avenue knew the drill: an ambulance or a coroner’s wagon takes the body, in a zip bag. Two white cops rolling a dead black woman into an old waterbed and lifting her into an unmarked car was weird.
Tim crossed the street to speak to the man in front of the Dreamers, who was standing by a sign that read, NO FIREARMS, HAIR CURLERS, UNDERSHIRTS, TANK TOPS, OR PEOPLE UNDER THIRTY.
“We can’t wait any longer for the coroner to take her. I’m going to take her in my car to Charity.”
“Bless you,” the man said. “Bless your heart.”
The sunburned patrolman climbed into his car and drove off. Tim pushed the button on his radio. “This is one six six four again,” he said. “I have a victim of a twenty-nine U”—an unexplained death—“headed for Charity Hospital. Beginning mileage 91,629.”
“Okay, one six six four.”
Tim drove down St. Charles Avenue toward Charity Hospital, swerving up onto the neutral ground to avoid fallen oak boughs. Hardly any cars were moving. The steeple of Rayne Memorial Church had collapsed into a pile of pretty red bricks, and power lines drooped low across the road, but otherwise the damage looked light. A lot of raggedy-looking black folks were walking uptown, though—the kinds of people not usually seen on St. Charles. Many had children with them, not the type to loot. It looked more like they were fleeing. An odd sight, but then again, it was a strange morning.
The emergency ramp at Charity swarmed with people pushing, lifting, pulling objects larger than themselves, like ants on an anthill. Tim parked and got out. The sidewalk was covered with filing cabinets, office chairs, bassinets, crank-operated beds, curtains on rollers, and, tipped into the gutter, a floor buffer. Tim averted his eyes.
Tim grabbed a doctor in scrubs. “I’ve got a body in my car.”
The doctor frowned. “I don’t know. We’re shutting down.”
“Shutting down? The ER?”
“Shutting down Charity.” He walked backward up the ramp, explaining, “We got no power. The generators in the basement flooded out.”
BILLY GRACE
NORTH CAROLINA
August 30, 2005
The TV screen at the Freemans’ showed people smashing store windows on Canal Street and running off with all they could carry, bass boats on Esplanade Avenue, people thrashing around in deep water.
“It’s quiet here,” Alston said in a voice lacking its usual swagger. “I slept out on the upstairs porch ’cause it was so hot, and all night I could see cars cruising up and down, pointing flashlights at houses like they were deciding which to rob. But we’re okay.”
They had no electricity at 2525, so Alston couldn’t see on television what was happening elsewhere in the city. Maybe it was just as well. Billy tried to keep his voice calm so as not to frighten her. He casually mentioned that his shotguns were leaning against his study wall, in leather cases. Alston said they already had them out and loaded. As casually as he could, Billy mentioned his real terror—the television was suggesting there might be nine feet of water on St. Charles Avenue before long. Alston went silent, then said, “I don’t know how we’d get out of the city.”
“Put Ivory on.”
“I’ll go find him. If we get cut off, call back. Only one phone on the second floor is working, and we can’t call out.”
“Okay.”
Ivory came on the line. “I need you to do something,” Billy said. “I need you to go scout a route out of the city. Take any of the cars. Try I-10 to Baton Rouge, then the Mississippi River bridge, then River Road. See if you can find a way to get everybody out.”
TIM BRUNEAU
UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL
August 29, 2005
Tim picked up his radio. “One six six four, en route with a twenty-nine U to University Hospital.” Tim wanted his ass amply covered. He gave his mileage.
“Okay, one six six four.”
The hospital lobby was as frantic as the ramp at Charity, full of gurneys, people running, shouting. What the fuck? The storm was over. Tim grabbed a doctor in a white coat. “I need to put a body in your morgue.”
“One of ours?”
“No, killed on the street.”
“No way.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not going to establish a precedent by taking the city’s trash.” He straightened his coat and walked off.
ANTHONY WELLS
We was doing good. Barbecued everything. Had a TV hooked up to a battery. Worst of it was, it was hot. I mean hot. It was like all the wind in the world had blown itself out during the storm and there wasn’t none left for even a little bitty breeze.
The water was up to the rooftops. And it was toxic chemical shit, from the Tenneco and Texaco-Shell back up there in St. Bernard. The smell was bad; made your eyes sting.
Shortie’s sister, she died. Emmanuel, who cuts the grass, he died. When they found him, they tied him to the pillars of his house. Miss Roberta Claude, Bobby’s mama, she died. Mrs. Jackson from down the street, she didn’t leave either and she died.
Still, we was okay.
TIM BRUNEAU
SOUTH PRIEUR STREET
August 29, 2005
Well, Marie, it’s you and me, Tim said to the pile of blue plastic in the backseat. Did that man call you trash? I’m sorry about that.
Was he speaking aloud, or just thinking that? He shook his head, was too tired to raise his hand and twist the ignition. He sat staring through the windshield down Prieur Street, which was rippling with pooled rainwater. A whole network of canals, culverts, and beautiful pump houses, and none of it working, seven hours after the storm passed.
Tim’s eyes drifted shut. The burned-out, weed-choked house on Jackson Avenue had been there since Marie was a teenager, maybe longer. Coming up in a neighborhood like that, with shitty schools, whores, drug dealers—she never had a goddamn chance. His chest tightened, and the backs of his eyeballs felt soupy. Pretty girl, dead at twenty-four.
Tim’s eyes popped open. Whoa. What kind of hippie-shit thinking was that? He struggled to sit erect behind the wheel. Anybody could rise above anything in America.
Tim let his head ease back and his eyes drift shut.
No, they can’t, Marie said, from the backseat. How was I supposed to break out of there? What were my people going to say? Uppity. That
’s what. ’Cause if I can, why can’t they? But I tell you what, I don’t even know how it’s done. I never seen nobody do it.
Come on, Marie. You’re making excuses.
That man at the hospital is right. I’m trash. But what else could I be?
Faces loomed up behind Tim’s eyelids: a thug with his arms folded like a tough guy, his lower lip quivering; a prostitute with a bruise on her cheek; an ancient man with a snow dusting of beard, mixing potpourri; an endless string of Pookies and Ray-Rays that Tim had insulted, beaten up, cuffed, and tossed in the can. Scumbags. Trash. Born as far behind the starting line as Marie.
A rap at the window made him jump. He opened his eyes on the jowly face of a patrolman from the Seventh, who was peering in, looking worried.
Tim’s face and uniform were soaking wet. With the windows rolled up, it must have been 140 degrees in the car. He rolled down the window. “I’m fine.” Cool air poured in.
“What you got there?” He wrinkled his nose.
“Nothing.”
“I just come from the Dome. It’s a fucking nightmare; don’t go near it. Any cop goes near it, he’s going to get sucked inside.”
“Yeah?”
“I saw some of your detectives hanging out a couple blocks from the Dome, at Villere and Perdido.”
Tim looked at the patrolman’s feet. He was standing in water three inches deep. “Where’s that water come from?”
“Fuck if I know.” The patrolman gave Tim’s windshield a friendly pat and sloshed away, kicking up rooster tails.
Tim started the Crown Vic and put it in gear. I’m going to find you a place, Marie.