Nine Lives

by Dan Baum

  By that time they were taking people out the city, and we sat around for hours in this big old parking lot. They had tents up to keep you out of the sun, and bottles of ice water. There were these Army nurses, in uniform and everything, going around asking everybody how do you feel, and do you want to talk. Had their first names written on masking tape up here on their bosom—Debbie, Allison. They were like mental-health nurses, and some people, man, were just crying their fucking eyes out. Got to remember, this was like day ten or eleven. Anybody going out the city then was the holdouts, been trapped in their house all that time.

  After a while, they put us on a bus—a nice one, from one of the casinos. Air-conditioned and everything. Even had a movie going. I remember it was one of them slasher films and the women on the bus were all upset, like, “Why are they showing us this?” But I’ll tell you what, when that film ended, they put on Ray—you seen that? It ain’t New Orleans, but it’s so beautiful, that black life and the music, and all. In some ways it was harder to watch than that slasher film.

  We sat on that bus a long time. Right out my window there was a big green and white helicopter sitting there, with “United States of America” all up on its side. And while I’m sitting there watching, damned if motherfucking Dick Cheney don’t get on it. I ain’t shitting you. Had about eight guys with him, but it was him. I’d know that motherfucker anywhere. He got on and took off, and a little while later they drove us out to the airport.

  That was cold, man. Everything was all fucked-up—covered with mud, windows all smashed. And nothing moving anywhere, not a cat, not a dog, not a motherfucking bird. Got real quiet on the bus. People were crying and all. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at, and that’s the truth. Waited half my life to get to New Orleans, and now it was dead.

  BELINDA RAWLINS

  HEARNE, TEXAS

  2005

  Belinda put the grocery bags on Alvin’s kitchen table and reached into her purse for the buzzing phone. The number on the screen was Danisha’s, Stevie’s niece. “Aunt Belinda, what are you doing about the shower?”

  “The shower?”

  “The baby shower.”

  “Whose baby shower?”

  “Come on, Aunt Belinda.” Danisha giggled. “Niecy’s baby shower.”

  Belinda leaned on the counter, faint. Her breath came in short gasps. “Danisha, I’m going to call you right back.” The framed photo of Niecy in her pale blue graduation gown smiled down from a shelf by the window; she’d managed to grab it from Mom’s house when she evacuated, and it had given her strength every day. It couldn’t be true. Niecy had made it out. She’d finished high school. She was excelling at Southeastern.

  Belinda’s hand shook as she punched the number. Niecy answered on the first ring. “Are you pregnant?”

  “Yeah,” Niecy whispered.

  Belinda hung up.

  BILLY GRACE

  LOEWS ANATOLE HOTEL, DALLAS

  September 2005

  Billy looked across the table at the pale, tired faces. He and Jimmy Reiss had managed to assemble sixty-odd people, a pretty good who’s who of New Orleans business, including Dan Packer, CEO of the power company; Scott Cowen, president of Tulane; Jeff Parker, of the Howard Weil brokerage; and, on the speakerphone, King Milling, of Whitney Bank, and Wynton Marsalis.

  “While we’re waiting for Mayor Nagin, let’s have a sitrep.” Jimmy Reiss stood at an easel that held a large pad of newsprint. “What kinds of resources can we marshal? Let’s not limit our thinking. Drinking water? Generators? Trucks? Medical supplies? What can you rustle up?”

  Hands went up. Jimmy filled two pages with suggestions, tearing them off and attaching them with masking tape to the walls. The door to the conference room opened, and a black man in a pale yellow golf shirt slouched alone into the room. He didn’t look like a waiter—no white shirt or apron—and for a moment Billy thought he’d wandered into the wrong room. Then Billy recognized the shiny bald head and realized the man was Ray Nagin. He was all alone. Nagin quietly took a seat at the end of the table and waited until Jimmy noticed he was there.

  “Mr. Mayor! Thank you for coming.”

  Nagin nodded, his eyelids at half-mast, his shoulders drooping.

  “So. What is your action plan and how can we help?”

  Nagin swiveled his head from left to right, his face without expression. “I do not have a plan.”

  Jeff Parker of Howard Weil leaned close and asked quietly, “Then what resources do you have that we can draw on to develop a plan?”

  Nagin pivoted toward Jeff. “Nil.”

  Scott Cowen of Tulane jumped to his feet and took over Jimmy’s list, continuing around the table, digging for ideas, keeping the meeting upbeat, and burying the embarrassment of the mayor’s incapacity. “Billy? How about you?”

  “I’m a lawyer,” Billy said. “Neither my firm nor the companies I own possess the kinds of resources the city needs.” He sat forward, rubbing his palms together. “But this is my idea. The collective wealth around this table must be in the billions. Why doesn’t each of us, personally, pledge a million dollars cash to the recovery. We can go out of this room and announce that we have sixty million dollars cash on hand: the business community’s stake in recovery. Today.” He leaned on his forearms and looked around the room expectantly.

  Nobody spoke, and Scott went on with the meeting.

  JOANN GUIDOS

  ST. CLAUDE AVENUE

  September 2005

  Kajun’s was packed. A television crew from Japan sprawled at a round table holding cans of Pabst, their camera equipment spilling out onto the floor around them. They stared into space, poleaxed with shock, fear, and exhaustion. Every reporter and news crew from Kansas City to Kazakhstan had passed through Kajun’s in the past few days to drink cold beer. Kenny’s girlfriend, Renée, wearing a Confederate flag as a head scarf, pulled up a chair and held out a tattooed hand to be kissed by one of the cameramen. “Renée de Ponthieux,” she said. “When Daddy dies, I’ll be Comtesse de Ponthieux.” She threw back her head and brayed like a mule.

  Sunlight filtered through the black-painted front windows. The fan that sat on the floor at the end of the bar, four feet across, must have come from a warehouse or an airplane hangar. Kenny had found it or, more likely, stolen it. It had no grating over the blades; if someone tumbled in, the room would be showered with blood and bone chips. The jukebox died, and JoAnn whirled to give it a kick.

  A man in uniform and a boxy bulletproof vest was holding an M16 in one hand and the jukebox cord in the other. “Listen up!” he said. Half a dozen other uniformed men stood in the doorway, silhouetted against raging sunshine. Not NOPD: they were fit and clean-cut, with unfamiliar emblems on their shoulders. They carried shotguns or M16s. Bunches of heavy zip-ties poked out from their vest pockets—riot handcuffs. They were so immaculate and well equipped that they seemed to have landed from another planet—storm troopers from the fifth dimension.

  The Japanese cameramen stared, mouths open.

  “Let me get your attention, please,” the man at the jukebox said. “This city is under a mandatory evacuation order. Mandatory means you have to go. Am I making myself understood?”

  “Go where?” Kenny, on a bar stool, raised his hand like a schoolkid.

  “Buses leaving from the”—he looked at a piece of paper—“Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.”

  “What about my bar?” JoAnn put her hands on her hips.

  The officer looked her up and down, as though trying to figure out what the hell she was. “Lock it up as best you can. There will be patrols.”

  “Patrols.”

  “Yes sir, ma’am.”

  “We haven’t seen police here since the storm.”

  “City’s full of them, and we’re here to tell you that you have to leave.”

  “What if we don’t?” Kenny said.

  The cop shifted his M16. “You will. One way or another, you will. We’re going door-to-door to the en
d of the street. When we come back, be ready to go.” The starship trooper backed to the door, his M16 pointed at the floor, and melted away with his unit.

  “Go where?” Phoebe croaked.

  “What do we bring?” Renée said.

  “For how long?” Andy the philosopher said.

  “Stay off the fucking buses,” Kenny shouted. “You get on the buses, we’ll never see you again.”

  JoAnn ran behind the bar and came up with a long-barreled shotgun. She ran outside and stood like a minuteman, shoulders back, feet spread. “It’s my God-given right according to the U.S. Constitution to bear arms and protect my property!” she yelled after the retreating cops. Kenny hurried out and grabbed the shotgun, wrestling it out of her hands.

  “You don’t need to have that out here, honey. Let me put it right inside.”

  JoAnn let it go and put her face in her hands. Sobs rippled up her throat, and her shoulders relaxed in a pumping release. JoAnn reached for him, buried her face in his shoulder, and sobbed. She was losing it.

  The starship troopers were back. No, these were disheveled, without vests, unshaven, and impatient. Two were black, two white, all wearing the crescent and star of the NOPD.

  “Guns!” the tall one in front shouted. He had JoAnn’s shotgun and was jacking out shells. Hands crawled up JoAnn’s back and took her .38. They dumped the cartridges into a Hubig’s Pies carton full of shells and dropped the .38 in with them. Another cop was pawing around under the bar.

  “He’s got the nine-millimeter!” Barbara called.

  “Hey!” JoAnn said. “Am I getting some kind of receipt for those?”

  “Yeah,” said the lead cop, grabbing his crotch. “Here’s your receipt.” They went loping on up St. Claude.

  “Christ almighty,” said Andy the philosopher. “This is getting on my last gay nerve.”

  FRANK MINYARD

  ST. GABRIEL

  September 2005

  The state police commander stood up and removed his Smokey Bear hat.

  “Let me guess,” Frank said. “You’re not picking up bodies.”

  The commander shrugged. “Don’t ask me why. It’s the word from headquarters.”

  “So what’s next?” Frank spread his arms like Saint Francis. “Do we put out a call on the radio for volunteers, for Christ’s sake?”

  The door to the library flew open and a young man stepped through—tall and vigorous, his chinos creased, a logo on the breast of his light blue golf shirt. His blond hair had been blow-dried artfully into a frame for his handsome face. He seemed to radiate inner light. He raised a mighty arm. “I’ll collect the bodies!”

  Everybody stared, mouths hanging open.

  “Who are you?” Frank said.

  “Kenyon!” he shouted. “A subsidiary of Service Corporation International!” Instantly, Frank understood. SCI was the biggest funeral-home operator in the United States. It was almost impossible to die in the United States without SCI getting a piece of the action. The sound of truck engines filtered into the room.

  A soldier, peering out the window, yelled, “It’s the bodies!”

  The library crackled with applause.

  “Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” Frank said as he and Corinne followed the crowd out to meet the trucks. “Dead people rot on the streets of New Orleans for a week and a half so the feds can sign a private contract.”

  ANTHONY WELLS

  They treated us good at the airport. Gave us toothbrushes, soap. Had soldiers coming around handing out sandwiches. They sat us out at Gate C-5 for hours and hours, but it was all right. The air-conditioning was on. It was clean. Roger went around doing tricks for the kids, but I think he mostly just scared them, missing them four front teeth and all.

  Finally, they put us on a plane, a regular airline plane because they’d run out of Army planes. The whole time, they wouldn’t tell us where we were going. “You’ll know when you get there,” they said, but what kind of shit is that? Some people said, “No, I ain’t going,” and the soldiers and police and all, they just said, “Oh yes you are.” Like we was under communism or some shit. Put us all on that plane with dogs all up and down the aisle, people crying. We flew I don’t know how long. An hour. Maybe two. Set down right before dawn. When we come to a stop, the door opens, and this white man gets on. He’s wearing a suit and tie all buttoned up, and it’s like five o’clock in the morning. He looks like a preacher. I look back to see what it is he’s looking at, and oh Lordy Jesus, that plane was full of stinking, crazy-looking niggers. We got dogs, we got cats. We got that dude with his motherfucking hedgehog. One dude, with the big gold grille, had a big-ass boa constrictor around his neck. This little white dude in the suit, he must have thought his world had about ended. The best of New Orleans delivered up fresh to his doorstep! But I’ll tell you, he was cool. He smiled like he was on a game show. Said, “I am the mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee, and I’m here to welcome you to my city.”

  FRANK MINYARD

  ST. GABRIEL

  September 2005

  The trucks arrived, the bodies moved through, the morgue rocked. Possible homicides were routed to a cubicle where Frank’s pathologists and James Brown looked for evidence. There were only about fifteen so far, out of several hundred bodies.

  Frank sat at a desk in the schoolhouse, thumbing through reports. In keeping with DMORT’s mission, they were devoted solely to ascertaining people’s identities so that remains could be returned to families. Yet buried deep in each report was a line for cause of death, and on each someone had written “drowning.”

  He stood up and found Corinne Stern. She was taking a break out by the Forest Service kitchen, her Tyvek suit rolled down around her knees, her clothes soaking with sweat. She was wolfing a huge cup of iced tea.

  “This isn’t right,” he said. “These people didn’t all drown.”

  “We’re not doing cause of death. You know that.”

  “But somebody’s writing down that these people drowned.”

  “We have to put something.”

  “They didn’t drown.”

  “We can’t do autopsies on every set of remains, Frank. We might get twenty-five thousand in here. DMORT identifies. That’s it.”

  “Corinne, listen to me. A lot of these people died from heat exhaustion, dehydration, stress, and from being without their medication—from neglect, basically. They were abandoned out there. So it’s political, what killed them.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “We owe it to them to get their cause of death straight.”

  Corinne looked at him for a long time. “My job is to take care of Frank Minyard. You’re the local jurisdiction.”

  Frank waved the sheaf of reports. “These are my people. The public ought to know why they died.”

  “Tell me what you want.”

  “I want all the bodies autopsied.”

  “Every one?”

  “Every one. These people were left to die like rats.”

  BELINDA RAWLINS

  HOUSTON

  2005

  Belinda leaned on her crutches, staring through the picture window at a highway interchange that looked like a space station, huge sweeping loops of gray-white concrete a mile across. Houston stretched in every direction, a carpet of Golden Corral restaurants, Midas muffler shops, Carpet One outlets, and Denny’s, Denny’s, Denny’s, as far as the eye could see. It was a city where only cars lived: no people, just cars, whizzing about on featureless ribbons of road, filling slots in hot asphalt parking lots.

  Belinda’s eyeballs ached from trying to cope with the distances. Until Katrina, she had rarely focused on anything farther away than a few blocks. And what was the smell? The apartment FEMA had given her had an odor she couldn’t place. When she walked, the tap of her crutches echoed dully through the living room. The doctors in Hearne had recommended surgery, and a specialist in Houston had concurred. She’d left Curtis and Mookey with Alvin and undergone the operation
on autopilot. The whole high-rise apartment setup was to keep her close to the hospital for rehabilitation and follow-ups, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember why it had been so important to get the knee fixed now.

  The apartment was too big—it took forever to cross the living room—and she certainly didn’t need two bedrooms. She stopped at the glass bookshelf and took down Niecy’s high-school graduation picture, gazing hard at the smiling face, the hint of dimples, the lifted chin, the contrast of the pale blue graduation robe with her luscious mahogany skin. She picked up the picture twenty times a day.

  Stevie had told her what happened on the roof at Egania Street the night the levees broke. Ditty’s baby girl, not four months old, had rolled off into the water, Ditty had jumped in after her, and that was the last anybody’d seen of them. As for Aunt Polly, she had waited alone in the heat and filth of the Convention Center, and died soon after in Texas. That was the woman in the wheelchair they kept showing on TV, the one covered with the blanket. Big, jolly Aunt Polly, the tonks-and-pitty-pat queen of the Lower Ninth Ward: gone.

  Belinda put a hand on the bookshelf and ran her eye over the severe furniture, the bare walls. She knew what the smell was: nothing. No smell. No cooking smell, no river smell, no mildew-from-old-furniture smell. She was hermetically sealed, individually wrapped, a unit of one, vacuum-packed.