by Dan Baum
PART IV
THE HEEBIE-JEEBIES
“The truth is that it’s not engineering mechanics, but Corps mechanics, the problems with the Corps and the Orleans Levee Board, and all the other helpers in this system, that need to be studied.”
—PROFESSOR ROBERT BEA,
of the University of California, Berkeley, on the National Academy of Science’s plan to study the physical collapse of the levees without considering political and management failures
FRANK MINYARD
ST. GABRIEL, LOUISIANA
September 2005
Frank and James stood in the wide doorway of the warehouse, watching FEMA’s DMORT people move crisply about, readying gear for a deluge of the dead. Eighteen hours earlier, a National Guard deuce and a half had plowed the water beside the courthouse and set Frank off on a hallucinogenic journey, one vehicle after another, to a friend’s house in Baton Rouge, where he’d sat in a hot tub like Henry VIII, devouring a whole chicken and a six-pack of beer. Dressed in a new T-shirt and chinos from Wal-Mart, he was back now in the torpid, miserable crisis. The air around his head felt liquid. His stomach felt distended from eating a lunchtime MRE. He stank.
James, on the other hand, stood as solid as Mount Rushmore, arms folded, gaze alert, graying goatee twisted into a neat rope. James hadn’t made Frank’s mistake; he’d evacuated on command and spent the flood days in Lafayette.
“Shall I show you around?” A young man with a square jaw and a DMORT badge that read “Andrew” touched Frank’s elbow. “Before we go in, I want you to see how we’ve done to secure the grounds. We put up that chain-link fence. The black tarp prevents voyeurs, media or otherwise.”
Frank turned slowly in a circle, taking in the buff men in olive green T-shirts who patrolled the fence, cradling rifles that looked like something off a Klingon battle cruiser. “Blackwater,” their T-shirts said. Beyond the fence rose a phalanx of refrigerated 18-wheelers, idling, keeping their boxes cold and ready to receive the first corpses.
“The school, of course, is sleeping quarters.” Andrew pointed to a collection of low redbrick buildings, connected by covered walkways, that once was an elementary school. “We saved you a cot by a blackboard, so you can put your things on the chalk tray.”
“Is there a shower?”
“There’s a garden hose. Let me show you the morgue.”
The floor of the warehouse was covered in the same heavy black plastic sheeting that draped the fence around the school grounds. Movable walls had been created out of PVC pipe and blue tarp. They stood in a line, like the stations of the cross. Technicians unpacked folding X-ray machines, gurneys, Tyvek suits, surgical masks, and boxes of rubber gloves from crates marked “Deployable Portable Morgue Unit.”
The people here, Andrew informed him, came from as far away as Montana and Delaware. Dentists, pathologists, forensic anthropologists, funeral-home attendants, fingerprinters. They put their names on a list, maybe years ago, to serve in case of emergency, and now here they were in New Orleans. Andrew faced Frank squarely. “As the Orleans Parish coroner, you are legally in charge, Dr. Minyard. We’re here to assist the local authority, and that’s you.”
“I’m humbled,” Frank said. “You got all this done while I was stuck in the damn courthouse.” He felt he might cry; Jesus, he needed sleep. He blinked. On a whiteboard attached to a wall, someone had written: “Today is Saturday, September 3.”
“I have a question,” he said. “It’s a week since the hurricane. Where are the bodies?”
“That’s right,” Andrew said. “Not half a dozen yet. But we’re ready. They’ll go first to decontamination.” He indicated a cubicle at the far end of the warehouse. “Then to fingerprinting; then to what we call ‘anthropology,’ where we’ll record everything that might help in identification: age, sex, race, scars, tattoos, and so forth; then to X-ray, over here; and dental.” He nodded toward the back of the warehouse. “Finally, DNA.”
“That’s fine,” Frank said. “But where are the bodies?”
JOANN GUIDOS
ST. CLAUDE AVENUE
September 2005
JoAnn set a case of Pabst down behind the bar, the three hundredth or so since the storm. She pushed her pistol aside and massaged the small of her back. She loved her tits, but carrying them around got old. The idea of jumping in the pickup and driving out of the heat and stink moved through her with the power of love. She could be at Kathy and Roney’s by nightfall, taking a hot shower, lying in a quiet backyard hammock with a plate of good food. She could sleep on clean sheets, unpeeling the tension like a bandage from a skull wound. She tightened her fingers around the case of Pabst as though physically to anchor herself to the spot.
Mitch leaned over the bar, his eyes swimming in their sockets like two undercooked eggs. “You know who did the voice of Yogi Bear?”
“Who?” JoAnn sighed.
“Art Carney.”
JoAnn fought the urge to cry. Her little bar was Mitch’s whole world. She reached out and patted his arm. “Hey. Go eat something.” A pot of red beans and another of rice sat on a folding table. The jukebox started: “Sweet Home Alabama.” A brown dog, sleeping on the pool table, sat up and licked his balls.
JoAnn stood and planted her fists on the bar. “Hey!” she shouted. Heads turned. “We’re going to make it! We stick together, we’ll be fine. Right?”
The lights went out and the jukebox stopped, crashing the bar into a spooky silence; from the alley, the hum of the generator died.
“Clint Eastwood’s father? Stan Laurel,” Mitch said. “Trust me. What I’m saying is real close to the truth.”
ANTHONY WELLS
Then one day a big old Army truck come through the water, full of police and soldiers and people they were picking up. I said, “I appreciate your coming, but you’re a little fucking late.” They said, “The governor and mayor made it a mandatory evacuation and you must leave.” I said I’d think about it. I don’t know why I said that; I wanted the fuck out of there. It was getting old, man. No women, nothing to do all day but sit up there in the heat and breathe that shit. Ice all melted, and Roger’s big pile of meat was starting to get funky, you feel me? But shit, they leave our ass out there for a week, ten days, and then come say we got to go? Leave our homes like we’re in a dictatorship? I told them, I said, “Why don’t you pick up Emmanuel, who cuts the grass? He’s tied up in front of his house so he don’t float away.”
I could see them soldiers and police talking to each other, like they’re wondering if it’s worth coming up those rickety stairs to fight this crazy nigger. They said they’d come back tomorrow, and Roger and me would be ready.
Next day they come back like they said, only this time they got the guns out, all pointed up at us, clicking them. “Mr. Wells, you decided what you’re going to do?” I said, “Where are we going?” “You’ll find out when you get there.” Shit. “What can we take?” “One bag.” So we went. I’ll tell you, man, I’d a known how long it was going to be until I saw that place again, I wouldn’t have gone.
FRANK MINYARD
ST. GABRIEL
September 2005
Frank slept poorly on the narrow cot. He skipped the MRE breakfast, took a seat early in the school library, and watched the others file in: a captain from the state police, sharp in blue on blue; a National Guard colonel in black and green camo; an officer of the Eighty-second Airborne in a snappy maroon beret; a New Orleans police lieutenant in Task Force fatigues; and a sprinkling of DMORT pathologists and administrators. The woman to his right extended a hand and introduced herself as Corinne Stern, the former medical examiner of El Paso, Texas.
Sheaves of paper riffled, dry-erase markers squeaked on whiteboards, acronyms spilled like a dropped Scrabble set. Frank felt himself nodding off in the heat and forced himself erect. He was supposed to be in charge. “Wait,” he heard himself saying. “None of this means anything if nobody’s collecting the bodies.” He turned to a DMORT official
to his left. “Didn’t I hear you say your people would start today?”
The man shifted in his chair. “We’ve been waved off. That’s what I was just saying.”
“Waved off.”
“Our orders are to stand down.”
Frank smoothed his hair off his damp forehead and looked around at the officers, soldiers, and bureaucrats. “Look. I appreciate all you’ve done. But if nobody’s going to collect bodies, what’s the point?” Corinne shook her head and inspected her nails. The National Guard colonel coughed.
The officer in the maroon beret stood up. “I can get that process started.”
“You can?”
“My soldiers will collect the bodies.”
Right on, Frank thought. The Eighty-second Airborne.
BELINDA RAWLINS
INTERSTATE 10 WESTBOUND
September 2005
“How long we going to be in Texas?”
“I don’t know.”
“I want to go home.”
“Me too.”
“When can we go home?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where’s Mr. Wil?”
“In Texas.”
“We going to see him?”
“I don’t know.”
Belinda felt like she was floating above the car, watching herself drive Curtis across the green rolling countryside of east Texas. She kept waiting for “Belinda” to lose her patience with Curtis’s whiny questioning, but “Belinda” never did. “Belinda” kept driving, staring grimly over the steering wheel, leaving behind the stinking Baton Rouge motel room, heading for Alvin’s house in Hearne. He was on leave from Iraq and had wired her enough money. Mookey was on her way to Alvin’s, too, from Lionus’s. Niecy had wanted to come—poor thing, staying at college in Hammond on her own while her family scattered every which way—but Belinda had stood firm: don’t miss a class. Niecy would get her education the proper way: immediately after high school, full-time, straight through—the way Belinda had dreamed of.
“Where are Faye and Skeeter?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where’s Ditty?”
“I don’t know.”
“How ’bout Aunt Polly?” Curtis looked over with a wry smile; he knew he was being a pest.
Belinda made herself smile. “I don’t know.” She might be losing her mind—she couldn’t have told Curtis what day it was; there seemed to be no difference between waking and sleeping—but she could be kind. For the first time in her life, she had no plan. She was just getting by, precisely the condition she’d spent a lifetime trying to avoid.
An exit loomed, and she signaled. Her knee ached, and she’d run out of Goody’s powders. “Wait here,” she said.
Curtis followed her into the convenience store. They didn’t sell Goody’s powders. The clerk, an East Indian, had never heard of such a thing. She bought aspirin.
Walking back to the car, Belinda felt an unfamiliar vibration in her jacket pocket. For a fleeting second, she thought it was her heart racing, that she was having a palpitation, or a stroke. But it was her cell phone, dead since the storm. She took it from her pocket: a text message, from cousin Stevie.
She wrenched open the phone: “DITTY AND THE BABY DIDN’T MAKE IT.”
FRANK MINYARD
ST. GABRIEL
September 2005
Corinne Stern had thrown open every window in the school library, but not a breeze stirred.
The colonel from the Eighty-second Airborne stood in front of the whiteboard, kneading his maroon beret. “We, ah, were told not to proceed with retrieval of the bodies.”
“Told by who?” Frank tapped a pencil on the miniature desk that trapped his legs.
“My orders came from my commanding officer; I don’t know who called him.” The poor man hesitated a moment, and sat down in his absurdly small chair.
Another colonel in camo fatigues stood up. “Okay.” He lifted his cap, sweaty pate glistening under the buzz cut. “I’ll get my people on it.” He seemed pleased to have a chance to show up the vaunted Eighty-second Airborne. There was a murmur of relief and a scraping of chairs.
Right on, Frank thought. The National Guard.
TIM BRUNEAU
ABOVE LAKEVIEW
September 2005
Tim clenched the safety strap and leaned out over Lakeview, the Black Hawk’s rotor wash lifting his hair. It was as though Lake Pontchartrain had grown across the city. The old shore was gone. The new one, a mile south, lapped at the mansions along St. Charles Avenue. Lakeview, Broadmoor, Gentilly, Mid-City, the Ninth Ward—they were nothing but lake water, and a neat grid of rooftops poking through. Blue sky and white clouds reflecting off the water made it look as though New Orleans were floating in midair. Tim was half sorry he’d talked these guardsmen into giving him a look.
Straight underneath him was his house. Brown water covered the tops of the windows. In the driveway, his beloved white pickup, with the sweet straight-six engine that would have run forever, shone like a coral reef. He looked, finding Jackson Avenue, and then south toward Baronne Street, where a spot of yellow was barely visible under some fallen branches. It might have been a car. It might have been anything.
JOYCE MONTANA
HOUSTON
2005
“Joyce, look! It’s the Circle Food Store!”
Joyce lay on the hard motel bed, her eyes closed. She’d been had enough of flood scenes and looting. And now the Circle. She propped herself onto her elbows. Joyce walked to the Circle almost every day of her life, and there it was, full of water. A man stood in front of it, in water up to his chest. The Circle was only a couple of blocks from her house; if the water was that deep, her house was flooded, and with it Tootie’s suits.
The camera turned, moved, and there on the corner of St. Bernard Avenue and Villere Street—her own corner—a young woman slogged along in water up to her knees. It had never felt to Joyce like she was walking downhill to the Circle, but it looks like she had been all those years. If the water was only knee-deep, her house, four steps up from the street, might be okay.
The phone rang. Denise answered and handed her the receiver. “Oh, Miss Joyce, it’s good to hear your voice!” Fred Johnson’s high, ringing voice came through loud and sharp.
“I’m fine,” Joyce cried. “Where are you?”
“I’m in the city!”
“What you doing there?”
“It’s crazy here.”
“I know that. Get yourself out to someplace safe.”
“I’m okay. I’m helping the National Guard. Listen: I owe you an apology.”
“What you mean?”
“We went in your house.”
“How’d you get in my house? I got a glass door and a wood door.”
“We, ah, we broke them open.”
“What you do that for?” Joyce felt her voice rising.
“We didn’t know where you were! We knocked and knocked and nobody answered.”
“You thought … what?”
Fred didn’t say anything.
“If I was dead, you couldn’t do nothing for me no way!”
“I know that.” He sounded like Darryl as a boy, when she used to wear him out for doing something stupid. “But the house is fine. Tootie’s suits are fine. Water come up the steps, but didn’t get in.”
“Well, you close up the house best you can.” She hung up the phone and sighed, turning to Denise.
“I got to go home.”
FRANK MINYARD
ST. GABRIEL
September 2005
Frank and James sat on packing crates on the lawn in front of the school, forcing themselves, despite the cloying heat, to eat steaming mounds of beef Stroganoff over noodles. The Forest Service had shown up with a field kitchen, ready and able to serve the kind of food appropriate to fighting forest fires in Idaho.
“Maybe today.” Frank threw his plate in a trash pile and stood, feeling like he was pushing against a hot, wet ta
rp. The refrigerated trucks idled beyond the fence, empty.
“I hope so,” James said. “Every day that goes by is going to make them messier.”
Frank eased into a desk chair next to Corinne. The National Guard colonel slunk in, looking like a whipped dog.
“The mission’s a no go. Apparently DOD thinks there’s some risk of infection to my soldiers.”
“Well, yes.” Frank leaned over his tiny desk. “But there’s a health risk to the whole city if the bodies aren’t collected!”
“Apparently Legal had a problem,” the colonel said.
“Which is it? Medical problem or legal?” Frank’s pulse raced. “You blaming the doctors or the lawyers?”
“I’m as sorry as you are,” the colonel said, sitting down.
“Come on, people.” Frank glared around the room. “This is getting absurd. We’ve been here four days!”
The state police commander, in crisp blue on blue, raised a hand. “My people can do it.”
Right on, Frank thought. Local boys. The Louisiana State Police.
ANTHONY WELLS
They didn’t take us to no Superdome. By then, they were cleaning that bitch out. That’s when they found all them women raped, the murdered babies, all that shit. They took us to the Convention Center, and, man, they had that shit tight! The Army was running it by then, and they took everything you had—guns, knives, even my ink pen. One thing they didn’t take away was people’s animals. It was like every other person there had him a damned dog on a leash. One guy had a basket of kittens. Another had a hedgehog up under his shirt. I ain’t kidding you. A hedgehog. Couldn’t take an ink pen in there, but go ahead, sir, take your hedgehog.