by Dan Baum
She kept the television on. The shots that CNN kept calling “Lower Ninth Ward” were unrecognizable—agitated black people yelling at the camera, soldiers with guns marching up St. Claude Avenue. She pulled from her purse a big bottle of Vicodin and the new refill of her Ambien sleeping-pill prescription. She opened both and spilled the contents onto the coffee table, the pills bouncing around on the glass surface. She lovingly gathered them into a big pile, mixed them together absently, swirling them around, making patterns. Then she counted them: nineteen Vicodin and thirty-one Ambien. Plenty.
Her purse buzzed, and she fished out the cell phone. Mookey’s number: she couldn’t not answer. She flipped the phone open and placed it to her ear, the other hand cupped over the pills, as though to hide them.
“I just wanted to hear your voice,” Mookey said. “I love you.” It took Belinda ten minutes to sort the pills and put them back in their bottles.
RONALD LEWIS
THIBODAUX
September 2005
In the garish, bug-swirling glare of a yellow porch bulb, Dorothy held up a worn schoolgirl’s composition booklet. “Lots have died,” she said. “I been keeping a list.”
They were sitting outside the garden apartment where Dorothy was staying in Thibodaux, near Ronald and Minnie’s rental. She opened the tablet and ran a crooked finger down the handwritten list. “Miz Green and her grandbaby, two years old. They died together. Miz Green was contrary; you remember that. Her son brought her out to the Superdome and she didn’t like the conditions, so he brought her back home. Her house floated from Prieur almost to Claiborne. They found the little girl’s body and, later on, Miz Green.”
Dorothy went on. “Miss Weatherbee on Caffin Avenue. Peewee Walker. Mr. Converse’s sister down the street. Samuel Jones, my brother-in-law’s nephew. A friend of mine named Louis. Michelle Scott—her husband died. So did Leona Scott.” On she went, each achingly familiar face rising up before Ronald and then fading like smoke. Dorothy had eighteen names.
Ronald’s cell phone rang. “Mr. Lewis?” A white man with a northern voice identified himself as Steve Inskeep, a reporter for some radio station with “National” in the title. “I was hoping that you could help explain to our listeners the significance of the Lower Ninth Ward.”
Ronald smacked the phone against his ear. The significance of the Lower Ninth Ward? To hear somebody speak the words, let alone a Yankee establishment man, was to hear angels break into song.
“How did you get my name?”
“Through a lady named Helen Regis.” Helen Regis—that white lady professor from the Pigeontown Steppers parade.
“I’ll meet you anytime,” Ronald said.
FRANK MINYARD
ST. GABRIEL
September 2005
Frank and James stood in the school yard watching the techs heave filthy, rotten wooden boxes onto gurneys for the journey through the ID stations. Coffins that had floated out of some aboveground cemetery; it had never occurred to Frank that they’d be identifying the long dead.
A yip of alarm came from the anthropology cubicle, and a woman in a Tyvek suit came staggering out, pointing. They ran over and peered into a mossy wooden coffin. A muddy skeleton in tattered rags lay in about three inches of fine silt. Something moved. Frank leaned closer. An olive green snake, about four feet long and two inches thick, wriggled through the silt and hid itself under the bones. Frank’s vision went black for a moment, and he backed up, palpitating. A couple of burly state policemen came running over, and he turned away to let them get on it.
ANTHONY WELLS
What they did was, they took us to this big basketball arena in downtown Knoxville. Must have had seven hundred cots laid out there. You could tell the people from New Orleans from the people working there. New Orleans people were raggedy-assed. Also, just about all of them were black, and the Knoxville people, they were all white.
They let us clean up, gave us clothes. Good food. They took pictures of us. Gave us a displaced-resident card. There was a speech from the governor and the mayor. They said, “We been waiting for you for three days.” They welcomed us like we were a good commodity, like they was afraid every other town would get people from New Orleans and they wouldn’t.
It was hard to sleep in there and you couldn’t smoke. We could go outside, but couldn’t go nowhere, because we didn’t have nowhere to go. There was a little convenience store up the street the first day, but they said someone stole something in there and they closed it down. They called us looters and refugees. Refugees is from another country. Refugees is from a war zone. I got a Social Security number.
We’d have gotten out of there sooner, but they didn’t give us the right kind of assistance. They give everybody a deficit card for $480, but we had to spend it at Wal-Mart, so actually what did they give us, you feel me? We couldn’t use it nowhere else. We had other needs. You might want to give some money to your people.
First they told us FEMA was coming to take our information. Then they said, “We regret to inform you that FEMA will not be coming.” They set up phones in the lobby, but the people answering the phone were aliens—Spanish-, Asian-speaking people. It took a long time to get my check. Then the people who were running the thing took our checks and put them into housing projects or hotels. So what did they give us? Hot shower and hot food. That’s all we got. They didn’t give us no hundred dollars. Then they told us we had eight days to leave the arena because they had to put on sports. What’s more important, people’s lives or sports?
You got to read your book of Matthew. God won’t destroy the world by water. That’s why there’s rainbows, God’s promise to the world. But I don’t know what’s going to happen to New Orleans. Won’t be anybody there to sing the blues no more and you need the blues. When you got the blues, you shake off the heebie-jeebies. The heebie-jeebies’ll kill you straight-out.
WILBERT RAWLINS JR.
BEAUMONT CENTRAL HIGH, TEXAS
2005
Wil slashed his arm down to stop the music. They sounded droopy, like they had no heart. He’d had the band on the field for only an hour, and the wind was going out of them. It had taken him a while to figure out, because these Texas kids were more advanced musically—picked up songs faster—that what they lacked was New Orleans intensity. It was a hard thing to define, but he craved that New Orleans filé in his gumbo. What he craved was that soul.
He and Reecie had taken a white brick house on a quiet Beaumont street. She kept him warm at night, and her kids were okay. Every woman he’d ever been with had brought along at least one child; women and children came as a package. For thirty-five years, Wil had focused on the here and now. He’d never dwelled on the what-ifs or the used-to-bes. No point in that. Sometimes, though, as he was driving the big avenues through the wide-open sprawl of Beaumont, he thought about his house on Dreux Avenue, and about Carver, worn-out and troubled. He thought about the grimy band room and the broken trombones. He thought about Nyja Sanders and Brandon Franklin, and all the kids like them, lifted from the brink of the abyss by the power of band.
He thought about Belinda.
But he couldn’t think about her at this minute. He had a hundred Texas kids wilting in the sun and he had to light them up. He raised his arms, counted off, and launched into “Purple Carnival.” The rests didn’t pop. The dynamics were flat. He slashed his arm down. “I know it’s hot out here,” he yelled. “It’s hard to play under these conditions.” On a whim, he thrust both hands in the air, the fingers outspread. “You see how my pinkies are crooked? I broke them in a Little League game when I was ten. My dad taped them up with Popsicle sticks, and I played out the game! You do what you have to do, because people are counting on you. You are members of a band.”
The kids stared up at him like cattle in a pen.
Wil ended the practice early.
FRANK MINYARD
ST. GABRIEL
2005
A scream erupted from the dark cavern of
the warehouse-morgue. Frank dropped his paperwork and ran down the school-yard path. A Blackwater guard fell in beside him, unslinging a short black rifle from his back. They rounded the corner through the big open door of the warehouse. A Tyvek-suited woman was waving her arms for help. Another woman was doubled over, shrieking. She wasn’t crying, Frank realized; she was laughing. The guard helped her up and led her out the back door to compose herself.
Frank shouldered his way through the technicians to the gurney at the center of the commotion. A coffin sat there, not a mildewy coffin coughed up from a cemetery, but an immaculate white casket with shiny brass handles. “From a funeral home,” James Brown whispered. “Someone didn’t quite finish.”
Frank peered inside, and clapped his hand over his mouth. A woman lay on a gleaming satin cushion wearing a fuchsia sweat suit, her hair in a perfect, stiff reddish bouffant. She was smiling brightly, her painted lips drawn back against white teeth. Her eyes were open.
BELINDA RAWLINS
HOUSTON
2005
Belinda lay on the couch, gazing at the TV, wishing she had the energy to read a book instead. Her cell phone buzzed, and she rooted in her purse. Wil’s number.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
Silence.
“How are you feeling?” Wilbert sounded tired.
“My leg?”
“Yeah.”
“It still hurts.” Silence.
“I was thinking of driving up to see you.”
Belinda shifted the cell phone to her other hand and sat up straighter. “How’s Reecie going to feel about that?”
Wil sighed. “Reecie’s got nothing to say about it.”
“Hmf.”
“You are my wife.”
“Hmf.”
Wil put on his formal voice. “Would you like me to drive up and see you?”
“If you want to.”
“No, I’m asking: Do. You. Want. Me. To. Drive. Up. And. See. You?”
Belinda took a deep breath and tried to sound casual. “Sure, Wilbert. Come on up.”
TIM BRUNEAU
THE ECSTASY
October 2005
At the gangway, a young woman in a sharp navy blue suit examined Tim’s badge and handed him a plastic card that said, “ECSTASY.” “Carnival Cruise Lines welcomes you aboard,” she said. Any New Orleans policeman or firefighter who’d lost his house was welcome to a room on board. Did Tim have a girlfriend? the woman asked. Did he need a second key?
Tim walked up the gangway, feeling like Richard Dreyfuss boarding the alien spaceship at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He’d forgotten what clean looked like. He’d forgotten well maintained. He felt like a stowaway, in his noisome fatigues. At the top of the gangway, a lithe young steward in a polo shirt welcomed him, looked at his card, and walked him halfway around the ship to a narrow beige door. He used the card to open the door, and Tim found himself in a small but immaculate stateroom equipped with two narrow single beds. The steward opened the door to a tiny bathroom and turned on the light. The shower stall sparkled.
After the steward left behind his phone number for “anything at all,” Tim stripped and stepped into the shower, gasping as the warm water thundered over him. He soaped and rinsed, soaped and rinsed, soaped and rinsed, until he no longer smelled like the Wal-Mart parking lot. He stood so long under the torrent of hot water that he began to nod off. Within five minutes of toweling off, he was asleep between blessedly clean sheets.
Tim lurched awake and snatched up the gun beside him, mentally still in the Crown Vic. No, he was on the Ecstasy. Someone was trying the door. Whoever it was went away. Tim sank back into sleep.
The phone rang, and he was back in the Crown Vic for a moment, searching for a phone, before sliding further down the chute of exhaustion, into a thick, dreamless sleep.
The light was on and somebody was standing over him. Tim leaped up, raising the Glock in front of him with both hands. The man backed away with his hands up. “I’m a police officer! I’m a police officer!” he shouted, stretching the breast of his shirtfront so Tim could see the badge. He plastered himself against the wall of the stateroom. Tim, in his confusion, kept yelling, “What the fuck! What the fuck!”
“Police officer!” The man cringed against the wall. “I’m sharing this room. For Christ’s sake!”
Tim looked at his gun. He looked at the uniformed man. Damn. He threw the gun on the bed and sat down heavily.
“I called you; you didn’t answer,” the man said, putting his hands down. “You some kind of nut or something? Jesus!” He stormed out of the stateroom, letting the door bang.
Tim moved his gun aside and crawled back under the covers.
RONALD LEWIS
METAIRIE
September 2005
Ronald pulled the struggle-buggy in to the parking lot of Dorignac’s supermarket and switched off the engine. With a sigh, the car released a puddle of hot coolant onto the pavement. A middle-aged white man with a high forehead was leaning against the door of a shiny white SUV. “Steve Inskeep,” the man said when Ronald had wriggled out of his car. “National Public Radio. I’d like to drive you down to the Lower Ninth Ward and talk there.”
Ronald swallowed. He wasn’t sure he was ready to see what the water had done.
“My press card should get us past the roadblocks.”
“Okay, then.”
They swept down from the interstate onto Claiborne Avenue. The Circle Food Store and the normally busy intersection of St. Bernard Avenue sat as still as stunned birds. Every house and business was deserted, a greasy black line slashed horizontally across each, so straight it might have been painted on with a ruler. That was where the water had stood, Ronald realized. Inskeep swerved this way and that, avoiding debris. Ronald opened his window, and the smell of Betsy filled his nose: the same rot, mildew, and gasoline. The great white rusty towers of the Claiborne Avenue Bridge loomed ahead. At its foot, a soldier held up a hand. In his baggy pants and heavy black-framed glasses, he looked to be about fourteen years old. Inskeep fished a plastic card on a neck cord from inside his shirt, and the soldier waved them through.
“Me alone, I couldn’t get through here,” Ronald said.
“Probably not.”
“I only lived here my whole life.” Ronald craned his neck to peer from the crest of the bridge. His old Deslonde Street neighborhood was off to the left there, but something was different. All the lawns seemed bigger. Before Ronald could get a grip on it, though, they were off the bridge and turning left onto Deslonde.
Inskeep hit the brakes. A pale blue house stood in the middle of the street, sagging like an over-iced cake, the slats of its siding splayed at the bottom. “That’s Mrs. Young’s house,” Ronald said. Inskeep inched the SUV around it, bumped up onto a muddy lawn, and rolled to a stop. What lay ahead was hardly recognizable: the Butlers’ house hollowed out like a rotten tooth, the pretty kitchen wallpaper obscenely exposed to the sky; the Paytons’ house plain gone—all that remained was the slab. There it was, tilted up on the other side of the street, smashed against Irene’s bar. As far as they could see down Deslonde, it was the same. Cars lay on their backs, or rested sideways against pushed-over houses. Chairs, tables, wads of clothing, toys, a clothes dryer, all strewn across the street, covered in mud. Ronald tried to speak. He was vaguely aware that Inskeep was turning on a tape recorder.
“Go up ahead here a ways,” Ronald croaked, his mouth as stiff and dry as lumber. The car inched forward. The levee was visible to the left. There should have been two blocks of houses in the way, but they were gone, smashed to pieces and scattered. That was why the lawns looked so big from the bridge; the houses were gone. Roofs lay on their sides like sections of giant card houses. Whole walls were rolled up into splintery balls. Piles of cinder blocks—the foundations of shotguns—lay shattered everywhere. The Skippers’, Montgomerys’, Mitchells’, Browns’—gone. The car crunched through the debris at the inter
section of Prieur Street. Dorothy’s house: gone. Miss Pie’s: gone. The Alexanders’ two-story house. Gone. Ronald swiveled his eyes slowly toward the one house he couldn’t bear to see: 1911 Deslonde Street, the tight little house that Dadá built, that Mom restored after Betsy, and that Stella had kept immaculate. Gone. Not damaged, not muddy, not broken apart. Missing. The slab was there, jagged pieces of pipe growing out of it like mutant plants. The cement front steps stood, leading to nowhere. Where the house should have been was a long view to Jourdan Road and the levee. Something big and red like a barn lay next to old man Goodwin’s rubble-strewn lot: a barge, two blocks long and four stories high, with something yellow crushed under it. A school bus.
To the right of the barge, white sandbags filled a V-shaped cut in the levee. “That’s the same damn hole they took us through in ’65,” Ronald said. But this was nothing like Betsy. Back then, the water had covered the houses but left them standing. This time, it had carried the whole neighborhood away.
They inched a few feet forward, and Ronald’s cell phone rang. Pete, as though conjured by the annihilation of their boyhood setting, said, “Hey, bra.” He was in Houston.
“I’m right here by Deslonde and Johnson.” Ronald glanced at Inskeep, who was holding a microphone. “It’s all gone,” Ronald told Pete. “Our house. Your house. You know, like gone-gone. No rubble on your lot or nothing. I’ll call you soon.” He switched off the phone. “Let’s go by my house on Tupelo.”
They turned downriver on Johnson Street, where the houses that remained had spray-painted Xs on them, with numbers and symbols in each of their quadrants. “The rescuers marked each house to show they’d searched it,” Inskeep said. “The numbers should tell who did the searching. That ‘FL1’—over there—means Florida Task Force One. They put the date, and what they found. The zero and zero means nobody alive and nobody dead. Look at that one.” A shotgun house that had slid off its cinder blocks and was draped over a beige Buick. The house hadn’t shattered; it seemed to be made of rubber, bent smoothly over the car. On its door was an X with “9-16” above it.