Nine Lives

by Dan Baum

  “You going to shoot the police?” She produced a badge in a leather folder.

  “Get out now!” She rolled her eyes and meandered toward the front of the store, the shopping basket swinging on her arm.

  In the parking lot, the Sixth District cops settled in for the siege of Wal-Mart. A couple of patrolmen drove over to Brown’s Dairy, boosted a refrigerated truck, and parked it near the entrance so they could empty the store’s perishable food into it. Patrolwomen built stoves out of metal display racks and propane tanks and, on the sidewalk in front of the store, started pots of gumbo. Jeff and Alan grabbed tents from the sporting-goods aisles and set them up on one of the islands of shrubbery dotting the parking lot. Tim washed his fatigues in a Tweety Bird wastebasket and put on the extra outfit he’d brought from home.

  Night fell, as muggy as day. He climbed into the Crown Vic and fell asleep with his gun in his hand.

  FRANK MINYARD

  ORLEANS PARISH COURTHOUSE

  September 2005

  “Is that a boat?”

  It was almost dark, but it looked like something moving on the water. Frank cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Ahoy!” in a cracking voice. He hadn’t had more than a couple of sips of water in three days.

  No answer. If it was a boat, it was tiny. He strained his ears. No motor, but here it came—two people paddling a pirogue up Tulane Avenue.

  Still no helicopters. Frank couldn’t understand it. If the water was this deep here, right in the middle of the city, all of New Orleans must be underwater. Thousands of people must be trapped, dying. Where is the Army? Where are the feds?

  He stared at the pirogue moving toward the courthouse. No, it wasn’t a pirogue. The two people were sitting in what looked like a Jacuzzi. They’d probably pried it out of the Value Inn up the street.

  “Hey!” Frank called.

  “What are they doing?”

  The Jacuzzi veered left. A hand reached out of it and grabbed for the green awning of Le Petit Motel. The other guy scrambled up on the awning and lifted himself through an open window. His hands came back out of the window, holding a television set.

  “Those aren’t rescuers,” the deputy said.

  TIM BRUNEAU

  RELIGIOUS STREET

  September 2005

  “I know a place on the West Bank where we can get a shower,” Alan said. They weren’t supposed to be patrolling with no reliable source of gasoline, and crossing the river was definitely forbidden. But sitting around the Wal-Mart parking lot had driven them crazy.

  “Let’s swing by Jackson Avenue first,” Tim said.

  Alan gave him a sideways look.

  “Let’s just see.” They glided up Annunciation Street, one of Tim’s favorites, the colorful shotgun houses packed close together, the light dreamy and beachy. It hadn’t flooded, but no one was home. Tim turned right on Jackson. On the cracked pavement lay a woman’s body, grotesquely swollen in the heat, hands tossed back over her head. Someone had thrown a hideous green and orange blanket over it, but the arms and legs stuck out. The smell wafted in the windows.

  “That her?” Alan said.

  “No. Marie’s in a body bag.”

  “Homicide, you think?” Alan flipped his chin at the woman’s body.

  “I don’t know. Let’s just go.” He released his foot from the brake, the Crown Vic eased forward, and they drove in silence, crossing St. Charles. He hit the brakes and leaned out the window. Water shimmered peacefully on Jackson Avenue. From Carondelet up, it was a canal.

  They climbed out of the car. Tim raised his binoculars. Half-concealed under a low-hanging bush up by Baronne Street, a dome of bright yellow plastic rose from the water, bobbing lazily among the oil cans and other crap. Marie had drifted across Jackson and half a block toward the lake.

  “Okay. Enough.” Alan climbed back in the car and Tim followed, his mind blank, as though a flatiron had struck him in the forehead. They soared over the Crescent City Connection, the sun sinking behind them. Alan was silent, for once.

  “Where to?” Tim said. They zigzagged through the residential streets of the West Bank, Alan giving directions, until Tim lost track.

  “Turn here,” Alan said. “Slow down.”

  “You see the place?”

  “I’m leaving,” he said. “Stop here.”

  “What?” Tim pulled to the curb in front of a wood-frame house and cut the engine.

  “I’m done.” Alan kept his eyes straight ahead.

  “For good?” Tim looked out the window. He couldn’t find words to scold or cajole. It was Alan, after all. They’d been through a lot. “If you’re leaving, you’re not taking stuff we can use.”

  Alan detached his holstered pistol and laid it on the seat, along with a spare clip, cuffs, and a box of ammunition for the AR-15 that lay across the backseat. He handed Tim his badge and ID in their leather folder. He climbed out, walked around the car, leaned in Tim’s window, and extended a hand.

  Tim took it.

  “Look, man, I haven’t heard from my wife and kids since the storm. I don’t even know where they are.”

  “Alan, as long as you can live with what you’re doing, more power to you.”

  Tim steered the Crown Vic toward the bridge, twilight fading to night—a scary time, since the storm. A commotion to his left caught his eye, a crowd thronging in front of a CVS pharmacy, partying hearty, laughing and shouting, probably lit up on drugs and liquor from the shelves. It pissed him off. He switched on the blue flasher mounted on his dash and whooped the siren. “Run, you animals,” he said, bearing down.

  The crowd froze in the headlights but didn’t run. One man reached behind his back and came up with a long-nosed pistol. Four, five, six flashes of lightning lit the street in front of the Crown Vic. Shit! Hot zips of breathy wind hissed by Tim’s window. He flattened the brakes and manhandled the car through a K-turn. As he came broadside to the crowd, he thrust his pistol out the window and, in violation of every regulation ever written, banged off five or six rounds. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a man tumble to the pavement; he didn’t know which one. He wrestled the wheel. Two, four, half a dozen people were shooting at him: a woman, a man with a rifle—louder than the pistols. He pulled his head into his shoulders, straightened out the Crown Vic, and floored it.

  Where the hell was he? In the sticky gloom, he saw the top of the bridge and snaked toward it. He missed the entrance, circled back, and hit it on the second pass, flying up and over, only stars and his headlights piercing the darkness. He was panting, sweating adrenaline when he came to a stop at the desolate Camp Street exit. He rested his head on the wheel.

  Tim, said a voice from the backseat. You shot that boy.

  I know it, Marie. They were shooting at me.

  Silence, and he knew what Marie was thinking: that cops are supposed to stop and render aid, that they’re supposed to call in a shooting right away so it can be thoroughly investigated, that shooting from a moving car and then running off is criminal. What was happening to him? What was happening to New Orleans?

  RONALD LEWIS

  THIBODAUX

  September 2005

  Ronald wasn’t so much driving his old car as massaging it along the highway. His big, rough hands kneaded the wheel, coaxing the car out of its temptation to drift off right. His foot gently rocked the gas, in constant search of the engine’s wandering, elusive medium between a panicked clattering and a dead-out stall. Even the muscles of his broad butt were working, subconsciously pulsing to keep the big, soft-sprung car ambulatory. His bloodshot eyes worked an anxious triangle among the windshield, the heat gauge, and the rearview mirror. His plates were expired, and a run-in with the police was the last thing he needed right now.

  Highway 20 gleamed with hot rainwater. The squall had blown through like a temper tantrum, and now the evening sun slanted in under the heavy charcoal sky, lighting up the cane with a brilliant iridescence. God help me, Ronald thought. Even knowing all
the misery these fields represent, I still find them beautiful to look at.

  He drove into Thibodaux and made his way to the semicircular driveway by the main hall of Nicholls State University. He’d passed Nicholls many times while visiting relatives in Thibodaux. It accepted black students, and had some black teachers, but its faux-antebellum buildings, with their forbidding white columns, had always sent him a visceral “whites only” message.

  Though he and Minnie were staying by his relatives, Ronald liked to stop by the shelter in the Nicholls gymnasium to see if any new people from the neighborhood had shown up. He’d even registered here as an evacuee, so he could sleep in the shelter if he wanted to. Today, though, he couldn’t muster the will to get out of the car. He looked through the cracked windshield at the fine lawn in front of the main hall mansion. The saddest-looking people sat among pathetic bundles of filthy possessions. They looked like field niggers gathered round the massa’s house. It wrung out his heart like a towel.

  United Radio Broadcasters of New Orleans was reporting twelve feet of water in Gentilly, fourteen feet in Broadmoor, fifty thousand people packed into the Superdome, still no sign of federal help. It was like underground reports from a battlefield—no music, no ads, no jokes. “We have the local homeland security director, Colonel Terry Ebbert,” the announcer said. “You’ve been up in a helicopter this morning, sir. What did you see?”

  “The Lower Ninth Ward is totally gone. Nothing out there can be saved at all.”

  Ronald snapped it off. Gone? What did that mean?

  A bus hissed to a halt in front of the struggle-buggy, and the dejected passengers filed off. State troopers in crisp blue uniforms with yellow stripes down the trousers herded them in a long line toward the front door of the mansion. The troopers were talking to the evacuees. The troopers didn’t prod them with sticks, but neither did they help them carry their sacks. One led a German shepherd on a leash. It ran its nose eagerly over the bags and bundles. Among the wretched evacuees, the troopers looked like—what?—not overseers muscling field hands along, but something from the History Channel. Jews shuffling from railroad cars, skeletal people in the camp yards, skulls in the furnace ash, dark-eyed children holding out little forearms with number tattoos. Ever since Miss Duckie, the Jewish people interested Ronald.

  It wasn’t only the uniforms and the dogs that made Ronald think of the Jews now. It was the thoroughness of the defeat his people had suffered. The line of evacuees stretched back to the auction block in Jackson Square, the slave market in Cuba, the terrors of the Middle Passage. This is our holocaust, Ronald thought. This is where we hit bottom. This is where it can’t get any worse.

  He took a deep breath and thrust his chin forward. And this is where we decide what our future’s going to be, he said. Look at the Jews. Almost totally wiped out sixty years ago and now they’re about the wealthiest, best-educated people anywhere. They even got their own country, their own Army, their own atomic bomb. Sixty years ago you wouldn’t have given two cents for the future of the Jews, and look now. Where are we going to be in sixty years? Shit. Where are we going to be in sixty days?

  He felt a chill despite the heat, and hugged himself. He closed his eyes and hung his head, kneading his biceps. When he opened them, he imagined a death’s-head on the broad brown expanse of his upper arm, as clear and stark as the numbers the Nazis etched. He reached up and put the struggle-buggy into gear.

  An hour later, Ronald’s upper arm was sore and swollen. A three-inch-tall skull and crossbones, with the legend “RWL 65-05,” glowed against his raw skin. “It’s beautiful,” said the skinny Confederate with the humming needle at Randy’s Fine Line Tattoos.

  “These are the bookends to my life. Forty years apart. Betsy and Katrina.”

  “What’s the little crown above the R?”

  “That means I am king of the plan.” Ronald palpated his achy upper arm. Katrina and Betsy were part of him; he’d wear them like he wore his own black skin. But hurricanes came and went; men planned and built.

  ANTHONY WELLS

  We didn’t see no free people, no National Guard or marshals, for about ten days. We could see helicopters flying around over the city, but not where we were. At one point, they dropped water and rations over on Chef Highway and people were running like it was the Twilight Zone.

  They said on the radio, if you want to leave, get to the Superdome. People were coming around in boats, and little by little the women went off. We told them, Superdome is fucked-up. No air, no water. Nothing to clean up with. But the women, they all went. Roger and me, though, we stayed. Pulled a piece of paneling off, made kind of a secret compartment, and we put up in there everything we’d gotten: cases of Armor All, motor oil. Courvoisier and Hennessy fifths. Cases of cigarettes. A gun we found in the auto-parts store. Little bit of cash but not much, because most of the places we hit, all the twenty-dollar bills were all moldy and wet. We took change, but shit, we couldn’t carry all of it. We put that all up in that little compartment. New Orleans wasn’t going to stay fucked-up forever. Someday that shit would come in useful.

  BILLY GRACE

  DESTIN, FLORIDA

  September 2005

  Billy sat at the kitchen table of his beachfront house in Destin, sipping a cold glass of wine and holding a phone to his ear, feeling utterly unmoored from the planet. The muted television on the kitchen counter showed images he had seen a thousand times but still couldn’t interpret. “Relax,” Jimmy Reiss said. “There’s no water on St. Charles Avenue.”

  Billy grasped at the chirping voice as a lifeline to reality. Jimmy was old New Orleans, rich beyond measure, but no bullshit. He lived on Audubon Place, a private drive of mansions off St. Charles—New Orleans’s most exclusive address. He’d linked up with a Texas company called Instinctive Shooting International, run by a bunch of Israeli excommandos, and landed a surplus Soviet gunship on the golf course at Audubon Park. Overkill, he realized in retrospect, but they were hearing such stories.

  “My in-laws left the city in a convoy of cars full of guns and made it to Baton Rouge,” Billy said. “I had my time-share jet pick them up and bring them here.”

  “I’ll tell you what was even scarier than being in the city,” Jimmy said. “On the first day, Wayne Ducote, Billy Monteleone, and I were up at my place in Aspen and figured we could round up some barges in Baton Rouge, load them with food and water, and float them down the river to the Convention Center. We’d bring people out on the return trip.”

  “Great idea.”

  “I made the fatal mistake of asking for permission from Don Ensenat, Bush’s chief of protocol.” Jimmy was a big-time Republican, a major fund-raiser and acquaintance of the president’s. “A day goes by and Don calls back. He says, ‘I talked to the chief, and he says Brown and Cherthoff are doing a good job. So let’s give it a few days.’”

  “A few days?”

  “Yeah. So no go. But here’s my idea now. I’m putting together a meeting in Dallas of business leaders. We’ll come up with a plan for the recovery, show our commitment. I have a hotel booked for this coming weekend.”

  “I was thinking the exact same thing. Who can we reach? All I have with me is the numbers in my cell phone.”

  “That’s all I have.”

  “Let’s start calling.”

  RONALD LEWIS

  THIBODAUX

  September 2005

  Ronald drove out to the FEMA center, a white trailer on Highway 1, and asked for a crisis counselor. She turned out to be a white lady from up north who’d come down after Katrina to help out. “My wife needs help,” Ronald told her, and damned if that white lady didn’t reach for her keys that minute and drive with Ronald out to the little brick house where he and Minnie were staying. Minnie came to the door in her nightgown, and when Ronald started talking with that white lady beside him, Minnie backed across the living room with her hands outstretched in front of her as though retreating from a ghost, the whites of her eyes gleaming. �
�You ain’t committing me!” she yelled, and Ronald felt his voice catch as he tried to speak as soothingly as possible: No, Minnie, no. Nobody wants to commit you to nothing; just let this nice lady help you. Minnie folded onto the couch and put her head in her hands, and Ronald, standing with his big arms dangling, could only think, oh, Minnie. All that fire and passion I love so much been knocked sideways by the storm. Every joint in him aching, he struggled down onto one knee before her and put his hands on her upper arms. “You got to get ahold of yourself, Minnie,” he whispered. “We got to get home and we can’t do that with you in such a state.” The white lady suggested Minnie see a doctor who might give her pills to make her feel better, and, sniffling, Minnie finally agreed. When the white lady had gone, Ronald sat with Minnie on the couch and took one of her hands between both of his. Her head was bowed, her beautiful dreads hanging almost to her knees. She moaned.

  “Minnie,” Ronald said. “I’m going to New Orleans. I got to get us home, Minnie. I can’t deal with this big old cup and deal with your cup, too. You follow me? I got to leave you here for a spell and see to our business. I got to start getting us home.”

  She looked up at him from the bottom of a deep well of loneliness. He ached for her, stuck out here on Plantation Road, the far edge of Thibodaux, with nothing around but sugar fields and nobody she knew within God knows how many miles. Might as well take a catfish out the creek as take Minnie away from Tupelo Street, where she had her sons and her cousins and her sisters-in-law all right there. That’s why I got to get her home, he thought. That’s why I got to get to work. That’s why I got to leave her here. He gathered himself up inside as though to amputate a gangrenous limb; this has got to be done. That night he left Minnie alone—had to start sometime—and drove back down to Nicholls State University. Time to spend a night with my people, he told himself. He lay on a cot all night, listening to the shuffling and weeping of the evacuees around him, absorbing their need, absorbing their pain. I am as responsible for these people as I am for Minnie. I am as responsible for them as I was for the men of my local. I got to get these people home.