by Julia Reed
At first, Havens told me, the body was so large and so decomposed that they couldn’t figure out the source of the overwhelming stench—they thought she was part of the bedding. Also, it had been difficult to tell, he said, whether she’d been a victim of foul play or had just suffered a heart attack in the heat, but they’d been forced to leave her there because there was not yet anywhere to take bodies, and even if there had been, there was no proper means of transporting them—hence Vera’s sidewalk “burial.” When the photographer’s girlfriend heard that the body was where they left it, she all but demanded to be taken there so she could get a picture. While I get the need to illustrate the more gruesome aspects of a tragedy, I thought asking those guys to revisit such a scene was a bit much, not to mention the fact that there were plenty of gruesome sights that did not involve disrupting a mission or disturbing what was left of the dignity of an “unfortunate” woman lying dead in her own home. Havens, who had been all but ordered to do whatever we asked, was about to radio that he was turning around, but his discomfort—and that of the rest of the men—was palpable. I told him to forget it and we were best of chums for the rest of the day.
As we drove up Jackson Avenue and crossed St. Charles, I began watching for Danneel Street, home to Rose and Roseanna, Frankie and Joe. The water line there was not much past the porches it had risen to when the gang had made their getaway, but just one or two blocks farther on, the lines were considerably higher. In front of a side yard, a chain-link fence bore a sign saying “Beware of Dogs,” while the animals in question sat vigilantly atop the flooded cars parked on the other side. “You can start to smell it now,” Havens said, and he was right. You could also see the evidence of the mayhem that had ensued as the water began rising. Brown’s Dairy trucks, packed with flooded loot, now stood at all angles with the doors wide open on the higher neutral grounds (known in less parade-going parts of America as grassy medians), along with dozens of white stretch limos and black hearses (the Brown’s parking lot, as well as that of a limousine service and a funeral home, was in the neighborhood). By this time we were driving through a housing project that had been in terrible physical shape pre-Katrina, and so notorious that even the out-of-state troops referred to it as “bad man’s land,” but it had not dawned on our savvy war photographer that the abandoned vehicles might have been stolen. “Man,” he said, “this doesn’t look like a very good neighborhood, but these people sure had a lot of limos.” At this point the two of us were atop the Humvee accompanied by Sergeant Morales and another young man who pulled a Tom Clancy novel out of his jacket every time there was a long wait. When I looked at both of them their shoulders were shaking so hard in silent laughter I thought they were going to fall off.
As we moved—slowly, since the water was now churning beneath us and coming in through the doors—I talked to the men, many of whom had joined the Guard long before it meant an almost certain stint in Afghanistan or Iraq. Havens, a litigation specialist who had signed up in 1987, told me he had talked with his wife early on. “I said, ‘If anything ever happens to me and you cry on TV, I’ll come back and haunt you. Because we’re doing what we want to do, what we’re proud to do, and you shouldn’t ever be sad.’” We both knew it was unlikely that something so drastic would befall him in New Orleans, but the mission was not entirely devoid of danger—or pathos. Toward the end of the crawl through the project, we came across a dead man, alone and facedown in the grass, his hands, the back of his head, and much of his torso chewed off above the twin waistbands of his white Jockeys and dark jeans, his ribs sticking out but his feet still protected by black leather sneakers. Earlier I had commented on the general good health of many of the dogs we’d come across, and now Havens looked at me: “That’s why the dogs aren’t hungry.”
We stopped but, except for the photographers who were immediately on the ground snapping pictures, there was not a whole lot for anyone to do. Just ahead us, there was an agitated pit bull on the roof of one of the units, and from the radio a voice in front said, “If he’s not a threat, leave him alone.” Who could tell? I thought, but a subsequent communication was clearer: “Rules of engagement on the shooting of animals, over: If you see any eating human remains, shoot them.” They rogered that, at which point another voice was heard: “The water’s coming in here, Gonzo, I mean really coming in”—and we were forced to turn around. Part of the reason for the exercise had been to measure how much the water had receded in the previous twenty-four hours and I was told that it had gone down a full six inches. Only the day before, Morales said, he’d seen a catfish swimming down Claiborne Avenue, another of the city’s major thoroughfares that runs parallel to Magazine and St. Charles. Now Claiborne was more or less dry, but the ground was covered in a disgusting sludgy slime that would later dry into a thick dusty hull marked by a web of deep cracks.
On the way back to the TOC, our convoy passed a fire station packed with hundreds of volunteers from all over the country, including the New York Fire Department, who were all veterans of 9/11 and who wore airbrushed T-shirts reading NEVER FORGET. As it happened, it was 9/11/2005, and there was no way, shaking the hands of those men and women, not to cry. They told us they’d all signed on for two-week stints and as we thanked them and began to pull away, they rushed inside and came back out with armloads of extra boxed lunches and cold Cokes and big bags of M&Ms for the Guard, who were so elated by yet another chance to eat real food they let out war whoops.
September 11 is also my birthday, so after another run by Elizabeth’s to grab some school clothes to send to Lizzy and a black suit for Elizabeth (“in case anybody dies”), we headed back to Baton Rouge to do what little celebrating we could. I had been in Manhattan on 9/11 and watched the second tower fall; the following year, on September 13, as I was dashing out for a belated birthday lunch, McGee had called to say come quick, Mike was dead. With the arrival of Katrina three years later, Patrick Dunne had emailed to say enough was enough, that perhaps I should make like the Queen and arbitrarily pick another date on which to celebrate my birth, preferably one not so loaded with bad karma.
Despite recent dramatic events, I had to say that karma-wise at least, this particular birthday was actually not so bad. I was forty-five years old, not exactly the age I thought I’d be when I moved into my first real house—and certainly a lot older than I’d pictured myself being back in the day’s when I was rearranging Barbie’s furniture—but I’d moved in nonetheless. And yes, a catastrophic hurricane had hit the city I’d finally chosen to live in almost immediately afterward, but it had all but spared our little patch on First Street—Eddie and crew, as we would continually find out, caused us a lot more damage than Katrina. Then there was our drive-through with the Guard, which had reinforced the notion that figuratively speaking, we were definitely eating cake. So it was in that spirit that we headed off to eat the real thing with my cousins, whom I dearly loved and never saw enough of and who really believed (Linda Jane is a devout Catholic) that our being together was an unexpected blessing of the storm.
I believed it too and when we arrived at Linda Jane’s, she and her mother and her daughter were waiting with the wedding presents they had never gotten around to sending, a lovely crystal and silver bud vase that had belonged to Linda Jane’s grandmother, my great aunt Trudy, along with an art nouveau tea strainer (I am a tea fanatic) that had been hers as well. After we uncorked a bottle of the rescued Billecart-Salmon, John presented me with his present, a glass oil lamp and a big bottle of oil, which was really funny but also typically sweet and potentially useful—it is sitting on the bookshelf behind me as I type just in case. Afterward the two of us went to an oddly romantic and surprisingly delicious restaurant where a really good pianist played at just the right remove and journalists and volunteers and evacuees filled the tables around us, along with a few locals intrepid enough to venture out among the newly arrived populace. It was another one of those out-of-time experiences in the post-Katrina vortex. We didn’t know a
soul in the place, our phones still didn’t really work very well. Just a few hours earlier we’d been in no-man’s-land and now we were in some pleasant anonymous place sharing a decent bottle of wine. I would have been happy to stay there forever.
10
DURING THE NEXT several weeks, I made a regular loop from Baton Rouge to Greenville to New Orleans and back, with the odd trip to New York thrown in between. Natchez is on Highway 61, between Baton Rouge and Greenville, so on the morning after my birthday, I stopped to see Rose for the first time. It had been two weeks and two days since we’d had the conversation about evacuating, but since then I’d talked to her on the phone enough to know that she had no privacy in the house with Thomas’s cousin, whom she did not know, and she’d spent whole days standing in line applying for FEMA money.
She couldn’t tell me exactly how to get to the cousin’s house and I don’t know Natchez well, so we agreed to meet in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart. I had barely made it out of the car when she ran over and picked me up off the ground. Thomas is a proper, reserved sort, so he stood by the car smiling slightly with his arms folded while we whooped and hollered and carried on. I was brimming with promises and enthusiasm—I’d blithely assumed that as soon as it was possible, she’d want to return to New Orleans just like me. But when I mentioned finding them an apartment in the event that theirs had been damaged, I could tell she was terrified at the thought of coming back. And then I stopped for a minute: Of course she was. All she had seen for the last two weeks was television footage of people—the great majority of whom were members of her race—wading through the floodwaters, waiting on rooftops, perishing in front of the convention centers; members of her own family had come terrifyingly close to being among them. Then there were the warnings of typhoid and cholera, and, after that, of toxic mold spores from the dried sludge (which Brobson had already characterized as more of the same alarmist hooey). In the best of times, as Roseanna reminded us whenever they got into it, “Rose’s nerves are bad.” The first thing she had asked me was if I had seen any snakes.
Unlike me she had a lifelong history in the city, but no financial investment. Even if I’d dreaded the thought of returning, I would need to get pretty chipper pretty quick, on the assumption that there was not much market for a half-finished house in a hurricane-walloped city. But Rose and Thomas rented their apartment; their neighborhood was in far worse shape than mine. Thomas had worked as a mechanic in the same garage for years, but his boss had never given him benefits of any kind, not even health insurance. The only reason for either of them to return would be the tug of roots and family (I knew without asking that Roseanna, who owned her house, would not stay gone for long), but I could tell it might be a long hard pull and I couldn’t blame them. I hugged her again and gave her a month’s salary and promised to see her during the coming weekend.
It was on my way back through that I noticed the billboards advertising Podnuh’s barbecue. All I had brought my Oklahoma boys so far had been cakes and snacks and sandwich stuff—it was time for some hot food. I figured that if Podnuh’s was advertising as far away as Natchez, which was an hour north, it must be good, so I called the Baton Rouge location nearest Linda Jane’s and ordered brisket and ribs and pulled pork for seven hundred, along with baked beans, potato salad, and cole slaw. There was a slight pause on the other end of the phone but then a very determined young voice assured me that he could do it, that I could pick it up the next morning. When we got there, I was amazed. This particular Podnuh’s was a tiny place attached to a gas station just off the interstate; the staff had stayed up all night filling the order. I felt awful for laying such a job on them, but the young manager—yet another person who could have done a better job running FEMA—assured me that I shouldn’t, and flashed me an enormous grin: “We’ve just met our quota for the next two weeks.”
When I looked at the bill, I knew he wasn’t exaggerating—one of the many things about me that has always driven my father, and now my husband, totally crazy is my ability to order up barbecue for a literal battalion without even thinking of asking the price. Still, I was flush for the first time in a year—with the exception of the ones to Benton and Mr. Dupré, neither John nor I had written a check to anyone in almost three weeks. It was exhilarating—like being on temporary parole from debtor’s prison. Besides, when we started hauling great heaping containers of the stuff up the steps of the TOC, the men were ecstatic. Captain McGowan on the other hand was almost embarrassed: “You know, you really don’t have to keep doing this.” I told him I did indeed know that, it was part of the joy of it. These guys had come all the way from Oklahoma, they were spending weeks and maybe months away from their families, sleeping on either the concrete floor of the most ridiculous building in town or in tents in a nearby vacant lot in heat that constantly hovered around 100 degrees. They had cleaned up the place and restored order to “Dodge City,” and so far they had not seen the mayor or the police chief or the governor—somebody had to welcome them, and I realized for the millionth time how easy it is to make people happy by feeding them.
Our next stop was the Sarouk Shop, where we delivered more ice and a couple of chickens to Bob so that Ellis could knock himself out on Jean’s gas stove. By this time, Bob’s signs had appeared on CNN and the front page of Le Figaro, and, given the publicity, he figured he’d add a plea of sorts to potential tourists as well as to the locals and their carnival krewes: “You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans. Y’all Come Back for Carnival. I Have my Parade Spot. Come Back Rex, Iris, Zulu, Bacchus, Toth. Proteus, Hermes, Muses, D’Etat, Elks, Babylon. Hey Throw Me Something Mister.” Next door, at Emeril Lagasse’s Delmonico restaurant, there was a white patch where Bob’s “Looters Shot” message had once been emblazoned in big black letters. When I asked him what had happened he told me that the young Emeril’s employee who turned up to check on the property was so aghast by his graffiti that she’d gotten back in her car and made the hundred-mile roundtrip to Houma and back to purchase the nearest can of white paint. His warning, she told him, was not “the kind of message the Emeril’s organization wants to send.” Maybe not, but I’m pretty sure that neither was the message Bob’s neighbor promptly scrawled over the white space: “Emeril Is a Wuss.”
When we finally made it to First Street, I had to laugh: Three Guardsmen from Pennsylvania were parked in front, taking pictures of each other posing in front of Anne Rice’s great violet-gray manse directly across from us. Pre-Katrina, this was a familiar sight—dozens of tourists a day came by on foot, by tour bus, in limousines or in cabs, and now we had a handful in a Humvee. Rice’s career-making Interview with the Vampire had been published in 1976; since then, more than a hundred million copies of her books had been sold. For years, she’d arrived at book signings at the nearby Garden District Book Store lying in a coffin, and at the annual Halloween parties for her devoted fan club she did the same. She’d been great for the neighborhood because she was a devout preservationist—at one point she had owned at least four other huge properties, which she’d restored and kept up beautifully. She’d moved into this particular house in 1989, and it had not only been her primary residence but also the setting for The Witching Hour, which had come out in 1990.
Some of our neighbors complained about the constant traffic—and the more goth-like elements of many of the sightseers—but I completely understood the allure behind their pilgrimages. I’d read The Witching Hour just before I’d arrived in New Orleans that first summer, and had been completely hooked by its descriptions of the “townhouse on the corner” with its “white fluted columns” and “tapering keyhole doorway.” Lying in bed in my apartment in Manhattan, I wanted to will myself into the “engulfing stillness and greenness” of the setting, but I never imagined that almost every description, from the “plaster medallions fixed to the high ceilings” and the floor’s “heart pine boards” to the “long silk draperies” and “carved marble fireplaces,” could someday be used to describe a house
I would actually live in, or that it would be across the street from the one I was reading about. I’d been in the Rice house once, years earlier, when I’d interviewed her for Vogue, and it hadn’t occurred to me then either, but I had loved the house and liked her, a lot. I’m sure I would have liked being her neighbor too, but she no longer lived there, having sold all her properties and moved to San Diego after her husband, Stan, an artist and poet, died of cancer. The fact that she now lived on the other side of the country had done nothing to diminish interest in the house, and it was heartening to see the first Anne Rice “tourists,” even if they were under orders to be here.
It was still way too hot—and too dark—to think about spending the night on First Street, even though Byron had given me tips: “What you do is sweat and get the bed soaking wet and then you cool down and go back to sleep.” We decided, instead, to head back to Baton Rouge, but first we stopped to meet Brobson at Molly’s at the Market. Molly’s is an Irish bar in the Quarter that had been open almost as regularly as Johnny White’s, though, as Brobson pointed out, it was decidedly more “white collar” than the “blue collar” Johnny’s, where the good doctor had become something of a hero by successfully treating the numerous boils afflicting the clientele to whom the FEMA medics had given the wrong antibiotics.