by Dan Baum
TIM BRUNEAU
SIXTH DISTRICT
December 2005
Tim piloted a police car one last time through the largely deserted streets of the Sixth District. The city had experienced its first homicide since the storm in October—two and a half months without a murder: a record. All you had to do to stop crime in New Orleans, it turned out, was evacuate the city.
Now, though, people were starting to trickle back in, and from a cop’s perspective they weren’t all welcome.
Here was a guy. The kid stood beside the road, holding up enormous pants with one hand, craning his neck to peer at all corners of the sky. He had a white cap on sideways, and was bare-chested but for a string of cowrie shells. Tim rolled up on him and lowered his window. The kid smiled, his teeth entirely gold and studded with a grid of diamonds.
“Hey,” Tim said.
“Hey.”
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Ain’t they dropping food from helicopters no more?”
Tim raised his window and pulled away, shaking his head and chuckling. New Orleans, he thought. Was there anyplace like it anywhere? In the rearview, the kid had his arms spread wide, pleading.
Sixth District was operating out of the open garage on the ground floor because the generator wasn’t big enough to cool the building and mildew made it oppressive inside. Russell had a bedsheet spread on the concrete and a grid of Glock pistols laid across it. He’d disassembled one and was working on it in his lap with a brush and sweet-smelling solvent. “They were underwater,” he told Tim. “Feel free to help out.”
Tim stood for a moment, tilted over his bad leg, looking around the garage. Officers were shuffling along a line of folding tables, heaping their plates high with food from foil pans. “Tim!” yelled Frank Young from the line. “Come and eat! K-Paul sent food over!”
K-Paul, Tim thought, feeling himself choke up a little in spite of himself. One of the fanciest restaurants in the French Quarter, barely reopened, was taking care of the cops. It was moments like this that made Tim sad to be leaving New Orleans.
But leaving he was. He’d spent the morning driving out to the department shooting range to turn in his pistol, and then to the Royal Sonesta Hotel in the middle of the French Quarter, where the police department had set up a makeshift headquarters in one of the frilly, chandeliered ballrooms. There he’d turned in his radio and his retirement papers. He still had his star-and-crescent badge, though; he’d paid for it and intended to keep it.
For the first time since he’d joined the Military Police in 1992, Tim Bruneau was not a cop.
He wasn’t responsible for the safety of everybody on the street anymore. Thugs were no longer a personal affront. It was going to take some getting used to.
The elevator was still not working, so Tim limped up the stairs. The station house smelled like a sewer. He found Cannatella in his office, perspiring through his white shirt. Cannatella’s eyes went to Tim’s waist and registered that the pistol—the real mark of a policeman’s authority—was gone. He stood up sadly.
“Timmy,” he said. “I’m going to try one more time. We are building a whole new city here, and there’s no new city without cops. We need to rebuild with the best tools we have, and you’re among the best we’ve ever had here in Sixth District.”
“Thank you,” Tim said. Then, quoting an old Popeye cartoon, he said, “I stands what I stands and I can’t stands no more.”
“I understand,” Cannatella said. “Nobody’s been through more for this department than you have. I recognized a long time ago that you have that rare thing, the genuine heart of a police officer.”
Tim felt his face burn. He knew what Cannatella was telling him: that he’d gone out on a limb to put a crippled man back on the street, and this was his thanks.
For a brief moment, Tim fought a powerful and unexpected urge to race back to the Royal Sonesta and snatch back his paperwork before it was processed. By nightfall he could have his sweaty old Glock back on his hip.
A whiff of mildew blew in the window and the feeling passed.
“University of North Texas has a program in emergency management,” he told Cannatella. “Emergency management—what a concept.”
“Timmy, you’re the police.”
Tim shrugged. Cannatella stood with his hands on his hips, looking like a statue of himself. Tim remembered hearing that the captain could have retired years earlier at full pension, so was essentially working for free. Cannatella opened his big arms wide. “Anytime you want to come back, we’ll be here,” he said, and wrapped Tim’s skinny shoulders in a hug.
TIM ASKED FRANK Young for a ride to a rent-a-car office out by the airport. As he reached for the car door, he said, “Whoa, what unit is this?” The blue-and-white was a Chevy; N.O.P.D. drove Fords.
“Lent to us by some department somewhere,” Young said. He stopped and pointed to a slogan painted across one fender. EXCELLENCE IN POLICING. “See?” Frank said. “It’s obviously not one of ours.”
Frank pulled the car out of the garage into the Sixth District parking lot and paused to make sure he had his cellphone. Tim glanced over at the dented cruisers parked every which way, and then did a double take; right beside him was his old white unmarked Crown Victoria. Tim sat gazing at the car in which he’d spent that first day of the crisis. He lifted his head to peer down into the front seat, on which he slept many a night in the WalMart parking lot clutching his pistol. Then he forced himself to roll his gaze into the back seat, where Marie had lain that long, long day, wrapped in a muddy blue waterbed.
Frank put the car in gear and away they drove.
ANTHONY WELLS
After the project, we were paying two ninety a month for a little place. They cut me off food stamps because I was working at the appliance place, making oven racks. I had no car, so I had to pay people to take me to work. Eight dollars an hour, and it’s costing me like twenty, thirty dollars a week to get to work. On the weekends, I’m looking stupid—watching TV, cigarettes, a couple of beers. My last check, I couldn’t cash it, because I was working for a temp agency and the banks wouldn’t cash their checks anymore.
Then the motherfuckers picked me up for driving without a license. I had five tickets, no license, no ID, no insurance. Altogether it came to eleven hundred dollars. I told Roger, “We’re not in New Orleans no more. They don’t let you do shit up here like we did.”
The judge says, “You got money to pay?” I say no, said I was going to sell the car and I ain’t going to drive it no more. “That’s fine, Mr. Wells, but we need eleven hundred dollars.” They locked me up; six months suspended and six to serve.
It was like a dungeon, man, eight dudes to a cell and I’m the only black man in there. I had seven pencils sharpened, all taped together, just in case. “What you doing with all those pencils, boy?” “I’m doing a lot of writing, sir.”
When I got out, I called my aunt Mildred; she was back in New Orleans. I told her I’m not putting up with this anymore. I’d rather be a bum. What Bush and them eat in Washington don’t make people in New Orleans shit, you feel me? She was all, “Anthony, come on down. You do the best you can and God will make a way. Trust in the Lord.”
And I missed my aunt Mildred. I missed seeing my uncle Bud. I missed walking around. In New Orleans, you walk around. You sit down. You see people. You talk. There’s noise all the time—wreck on the I-10, the pool hall, somebody playing on a saxophone. Gunshots. Yeah, man. I even missed the gunshots.
BILLY GRACE
INTERSTATE 10 WESTBOUND, METAIRIE
January 2006
Billy returned the Hertz car and rode the shuttle to the terminal, where Anne was to pick him up. It had been useful to have the extra car while Liam and Robert were in town. He was proud of them, and he certainly understood that Dallas held more opportunities for them. But he missed his sons. Only Ransdell and her husband were sticking it out.
The city was cleaving along racial lines in a w
ay he wouldn’t have thought possible. It was as though integration had never happened. The hurt that had welled up with the flood had caught him completely off guard. Richard Baker, a congressman from Baton Rouge, had introduced a bill to buy destroyed houses for their pre-storm value—a godsend—but he’d also let slip that “God” had cleaned out New Orleans’s public housing. Jimmy Reiss had told the Wall Street Journal that business leaders at the Dallas meeting wanted the city rebuilt “demographically, geographically, and politically.” People heard “demographically” not as a suggestion of mixed-income housing but as a call to banish blacks. Some good ideas for reconstruction were floating around—for mixed-income neighborhoods, for a more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly city, for instituting the principles of the New Urbanism. But it seemed to Billy that if a white man suggested something, blacks rejected it out of hand. Billy didn’t know enough about the condition of Charity Hospital and the public housing projects to know if they should be closed or not, but he was pretty sure the decisions were being made on the basis of something other than a desire to rid New Orleans of its black people. Yet the shrieking that accompanied those decisions: you’d have thought the city fathers were planning to reinstate slavery.
Billy had little faith in Mayor Nagin. His performance at the Dallas meeting had been wretched, and he still didn’t have the vigor that the crisis demanded. But Billy was grateful at least that Nagin hadn’t gotten down in the racial mud, pushing everything through the tired old meat grinder of black and white. In the context of post-Katrina New Orleans, it was a small miracle.
Billy picked up a New York Times at the airport newsstand, and as he fished in his pocket for a dollar, he heard a commotion behind him. Coming toward him, leading a phalanx of identically dark-suited aides, was Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan: What was he doing in New Orleans?
The next day was Martin Luther King Day, and Mayor Nagin delivered a speech. “I greet you all in the spirit of unity,” he began, and started into a fairly standard speech about how “lack of love is killing us.” But then, toward the end, some new spirit seemed to overtake Nagin, and in words that had everybody in the city quoting him that evening, he suddenly said, “It’s time for us to rebuild New Orleans, the one that should be a chocolate city.” He said it was the way God wanted New Orleans to be. “I don’t care what people are saying uptown or wherever they are,” Nagin said. “This city will be chocolate at the end of the day.” Billy heard the speech that night on the news and was dumbstruck. A chocolate city? And taking a deliberate poke at uptown?
Farrakhan, he thought.
FRANK MINYARD
POYDRAS STREET
February 2006
Frank Minyard parked in the gloom beneath the I-10 overpass, amid piles of ruined automobiles that had been towed here from all over the city. They sickened him; they made the middle of New Orleans feel like a junkyard.
He sat gazing through the windshield at a warehouse, darkened by the shadow of the overpass, the kind of invisible place that lurks under overpasses in every city. He climbed out and locked the dusty car, being careful not to dirty the worn jeans jacket he wore over a white T-shirt. The ostrich-hide cowboy boots, rescued from the pickup, were already grungy. He walked across the trash-strewn pavement of Poydras Street, climbed onto the warehouse loading dock, and unlocked the door. The warehouse still had no power; the open door provided the only light. A neat grid of identical white coffins, 170 of them, shone in the gloom—bodies either identified but unclaimed or so far gone that neither Frank’s people nor the wizards of DMORT could name them. Abandoned in attics, forgotten on rooftops, discarded New Orleanians. Nine hundred and eighty-five bodies had passed through Frank’s hands, but these couldn’t be laid to rest. Each was a personal failure.
The city had no plans for the unclaimed. None of the surrounding parishes wanted them.
Frank looked at the caskets a long time, wondering whether a fetid warehouse under a freeway would be their final resting place.
JOYCE MONTANA
ST. AUGUSTINE CHURCH
2006
“A sermon should be like a woman’s dress,” Father LeDoux said. “Long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to be interesting.”
Joyce covered her mouth and laughed, then wiped her eyes.
“We here at St. Augustine are being called upon in an excruciating way to do penance.” Father LeDoux wore gaily colored kente cloth, but his eyes drooped in sadness. “I was at a meeting with Archbishop Hughes. He looked me straight in the eye and said, Jerome, you have to tell your flock that they must get ready for death.”
So it was true. The archbishop’s right-hand man, the glowering Father Maestri, had told the newspaper that St. Augustine was a “dying parish.” The archdiocese had suffered $140 million in uninsured losses, because it hadn’t anticipated all its churches flooding at the same time. Any parish that wasn’t pulling its weight financially had to go—as though they were fast-food outlets, or furniture stores.
Father LeDoux didn’t keep good records, they said, but everybody knew that. His office had always looked as though someone had turned it upside down and shaken it. Father LeDoux was the most remarkable pastor Joyce had ever known. He made her feel a connection to Jesus, he knew her family, and he’d moved Tootie as no other priest ever had. So what if he didn’t keep good records? To take away his parish now, when his congregation needed him most, seemed deliberately cruel.
The powers of New Orleans seemed determined only to make life harder. They hadn’t reopened Charity Hospital, even though it stood as solid as though carved out of a mountain, so medical care was almost impossible to find. They weren’t letting people move back into the projects, though they, too, were largely undamaged. The state’s so-called Road Home program, established to help people rebuild their houses, was so bollixed up nobody was getting any help. And now, at just the time Joyce and her fellow parishioners most needed Father LeDoux, the archbishop meant to send him away.
“We filed an appeal to the archbishop,” he said. “Let us pray.”
FRANK MINYARD
ST. AUGUSTINE CHURCH
2006
Frank sat on the raised stage of St. Augustine Church, trumpet across his knees. Ever since opening the methadone clinic in the rectory more than thirty years ago, he’d loved this pink and white sanctuary, the stone floor worn smooth by the bare feet of slaves, the portraits of Tootie Montana and Louis Armstrong alongside those of Saint Clotilda and Saint Martin. The archbishop’s plan to close St. Augustine struck Frank’s heart like another death in a city that had suffered too many.
Father LeDoux was rocking. The skinny, white-haired priest, wearing what looked like blue and maroon tie-dyed pajamas, was doing a stiff-legged jig at the polished tree trunk that served as a pulpit, waving his arms over his head, as the congregation and choir sang. Tootie Montana’s widow clapped and swayed, as though reborn after the one-two punch of Tootie’s death and the storm. Most of the congregants were in their sixties or older, a time of life when they might have been winding down and enjoying being cared for. Instead, they were consumed in losing struggles—against FEMA, insurance companies, the state rebuilding authority, the federal housing program, crooked contractors who had descended on the city like vultures.
Frank felt his legs going cold and a tarry darkness rising behind his eyes. This was happening more and more lately; he’d be going along okay, and then suddenly his spirits would plunge as though all his energy and optimism were rushing out of a hole in his heart. The sadness—bottomless and debilitating—might last an hour or might last several days. The first couple of times he wrote it off as exhaustion—he was seventy-seven years old, after all, and was having to operate out of a borrowed funeral parlor forty miles north of the city. But it was happening too often now. Every time he stopped working long enough to grieve for his city, the pit would open and he’d tumble in. He had a vague memory of this happening to him in his youth, but not in man
y years.
Father LeDoux held up his hand for silence. “For as long as I have been pastor of this church, our friend Dr. Frank Minyard has come by from time to time to play his golden horn.”
Frank stood and put the horn to his lips. He nodded at Kevin Stevens, who riffled into the opening notes of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” on the piano—one of the first hymns Frank had learned on Myrtle Street as a boy. The hearses lined up at St. Gabriel appeared before him, and he blinked to dispel the image. He was blowing, but the notes sounded weak, choppy. He saw the grid of white caskets in the warehouse gloom. His lips stung, the mouthpiece kept slipping. The trumpet was fighting its way out of his hands. He took breaths where they didn’t belong. A wall loomed between his lungs and the horn, between his heart and the horn. PVC tubing and blue tarp, body bags and flies. He blew his way to the bridge and stopped with a gasp. Kevin glanced up, alarmed, and took over, finishing with ample keyboard flourishes. Frank sank into his seat, his face shiny with sweat, heart pounding. Father LeDoux caught his eye and, barely moving his head, nodded knowingly.
JOYCE MONTANA
ST. AUGUSTINE CHURCH
2006
Father LeDoux’s beat-up Oldsmobile idled beside the rectory door. Governor Nicholls Street was dark, lit only by a weak bulb attached to the outside of the church. Joyce was unaccustomed to being out so late, especially without Tootie; she felt like she was in a movie—a thriller whose climax was about to burst upon the screen. Father LeDoux came down the rectory stairs slowly, looking small in a tight black suit and clerical collar. A young white man, burly and long-haired, followed him down with a box of files, and as soon as they were off the last step, a husky young woman carried a cot up the stairs. Another kid followed, carrying a box of food. Father LeDoux wanted to linger, to hug everyone, but the young people were hustling him along, into his car. They wanted him out before they set their plan in motion.